Do working papers increase journal citations? Evidence from the top 5 journals in economics

ABSTRACT

Does it pay off in terms of citations to issue an article as a working paper before it is published in a refereed journal? We show empirically that the answer is yes, using 3167 articles published in five of the top journals in economics between 2000 and 2010. The effect is an around 25% higher number of citations on average across the investigated journals.

KEYWORDS:

• Working paper
• peer review
• citations
• RePEc
• preprint

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A10
• A12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Brown and Zimmermann (2017) provide a detailed discussion on this issue.

² http://citec.repec.org/

³ Baumann and Wohlrabe (2020) found that around 65% of working papers get published in a journal.

⁴ This number can be considered as a lower bound. We are not able to control for papers which are posted freely as a working paper on private web pages.

⁵ These dummies also cover what separate year and journal dummies would cover.

⁶ The least cited article in our sample has 1 citation, so zeros are not an issue.

⁷ In order to interpret the coefficients, it is necessary to take their exponential for those three cases.

⁸ Detailed results are available in Bürgi and Wohlrabe (2020a).