Research Policy 2019

If at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it: A response to the comments on our discussion paper on ‘Borrowed plumes’

Margit Osterloh^1,2,3; Bruno S. Frey^3,2,1

¹ University of Zurich · ² Zurich University of the Arts · ³ University of Basel

Abstract

We are very grateful to the editor of this virtual Special Section, Ben Martin, to open up the discussion on our proposal of partly random selection of publications (Osterloh and Frey, 2020). At first glance, our proposal might look crazy. Consider, however, the quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “if at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. Our reply takes up three considerations discussed by the commentators Oswald (2019), Wooding (2019) and Yaqub (2019): (1) additional aspects to our paper; (2) the discussion about how bad the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is if applied to evaluate single articles; and (3) how to overcome JIF.

DOI

10.1016/j.respol.2019.103870

Sources

semanticscholar openalex

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