Citation omissions in an economics preprint have set off a wave of recrimination and speculation on a widely read economics discussion board.
Commenters accuse the authors of purposely omitting citations that would have undermined the paper’s claims to novelty and contributions to the field, leveling acrimony and personal attacks. Economists Petra Persson at Stanford and Maya Rossin-Slater at the University of California, Santa Barbara told us they hadn’t been familiar with the omitted papers at the time they first posted their preprint, but their work remains distinct from these previous studies. Nevertheless, the two quickly updated the preprint of their paper – accepted by the top-tier economics journal American Economic Review – to include additional citations. An editor at the journal said it’s not unusual for authors to request such changes before publication, and dismissed the accusations made on the discussion board, calling the site “not a legitimate source of information.”
The study, “Family Ruptures, Stress, and the Mental Health of the Next Generation,” used data from Swedish national databases to compare mental health outcomes of people born to women who lost a relative while pregnant and women who lost a relative in the first year after giving birth. In their manuscript, Persson and Rossin-Slater write that their study is the “first to document a causal link between fetal stress exposure and mental health later in life.” ...
The response has been acrimonious, with online commenters accusing the two authors of everything from deliberate omissions to outright plagiarism of study design and datasets. At the Economics Job Market Rumors site, the related discussion thread — which extended well past 1400 comments at the time of this writing — veers from sober analysis toward the offensive. Less constructive comments run the gamut from berating Persson and Rossin-Slater for being successful women in their field to rating them based on their attractiveness. The accusations have extended beyond the two authors to encompass journal co-editor Hilary Hoynes, professor of public policy and economics at UC Berkeley, and four anonymous reviewers whom the authors thank in their most recent draft of the paper. ...
While I'm not discounting the fact that there may have been some selective non-citation, the bros at EJMRs are over the top. Anonymity provides the courage to reveal your ignorance and worse. Janet Currie said it well “It just shows how clueless the Econ Job Rumors people can be.”
