Do referees employed by journals merely screen acceptable from unacceptable manuscripts or are they charged with an additional value-adding responsibility vis-à-vis the papers they review? Drawing from editorial correspondence provided by survey respondents, I address this question by examining the relationship between citations of published papers and comments provided by reviewers and editors. Referees' comments demonstrate a positive impact on subsequent citation of papers, while comments made by editors show no such impact. Value-adding by editors appears to derive principally from efficient matching of papers with reviewers.

Lamm, R. McFall, Unionism and Prices in the Food Retailing Industry, Journal of Labor Research 3 (Winter 1982), 69-79. Marion, Bruce W., Willard F. Mueller, Ronald W. Cotterill, Frederick E. Geithman, and John R. Schmelzer, Food Retailing Industrv': Market Structure, Profits, and Prices (New York: Praeger, 1979a). ______ The Price and Profit Performance of Leading Food Chains, A merican Journal of A gricultural Economics 61 (Aug. 1979b), 420-433. Salinger, Michael A., Tobin's q, Unionization, and the Concentration-Profits Relationship, Rand Journal of Economics 15 (Summer 1984), 159-170. Voos, Paula B., and Lawrence R. Mishel, Union Impact on Profits: Evidence from the Supermarket Industry, Working Paper No. 88, North Central Project 117, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oct. 1985. The Union Impact on Profits: Evidence from Industry Price-Cost Margin Data, Journal of Labor Economics 4 (Jan. 1986), 105-133.

We argue that lawyers' sons follow in their parents' footsteps because the occupation lends itself to low-cost transfer of relevant skills and knowledge from one generation to the next, especially in the context of the family law practice. Analysis of Project Talent data reveals that knowledge about the law is transmitted from lawyers to their children and that this transmitted knowledge is a significant factor in a son's decision to follow in his father's legal footsteps. Second-generation lawyers who receive these human capital transfers experience greater earnings than lawyers who have not received such transfers.

Our data collection and database assembly efforts were assisted by John P. Sophocleus, Mark Gwartney, Michele Butler, and Scott Ralston. We received extremely valuable computer programming assistance from Jon Brunson and Edward Novak. Constructive comments were receivedfrom two anonymous reviewers. Financial supportfrom the Faculty Development Committee at Salisbury State University is gratefully acknowledged.

Intellectual collaboration in science includes formal coauthorship as well as presentation of papers at workshops, seminars, and professional meetings and informal commentary from colleagues, journal referees, and editors. While the incidence and extent of formal coauthorship are greater in biology than in economics, the extent of intellectual collaboration is greater in economics than in biology. Intellectual property rights to coauthored papers in economics tend to be assigned alphabetically, whereas biology is characterized by a strong merit‐based (nonalphabetical) assignment of intellectual property rights. These patterns do not result from differences in the relative importance of funding/physical capital.

Journal editors who publish papers authored by colleagues and former graduate students have been charged with practicing favoritism, with the implication that the papers in question are of lower quality than those written by scholars with no ties to the editor. Using citation analysis, the authors find strong evidence that although journal editors occasionally publish subpar papers authored by colleagues and former graduate students, on balance their use of professional connections enables them to identify and 'capture' high-impact papers for publication. This implies that a practice interpreted as favoritism by many scholars in fact serves to enhance efficiency in the market for scientific knowledge. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.

Using data from a sample of the economic literature published over the years 1950 through 1988, we find substantial support for an environmental theory of idea entrepreneurship among economists. In particular, we show that the percentage of economic articles devoted to the topics of inflation and employment are related directly to the actual inflation and unemployment rates in the economy and indirectly to the growth rate of aggregate real income. Moreover, we are able to provide evidence of undirectional causality running from changes in the economic environment to changes in the composition of the economic literature. Copyright 1990 by MIT Press.