WHICH JOURNAL RANKINGS BEST EXPLAIN ACADEMIC SALARIES? EVIDENCE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

The ranking of an academic journal is important to authors, universities, journal publishers, and research funders. Rankings are gaining prominence as countries adopt regular research assessment exercises that especially reward publication in high‐impact journals. Yet even within a rankings‐oriented discipline like economics there is no agreement on how aggressively lower‐ranked journals are down‐weighted and in how wide is the universe of journals considered. Moreover, since it is typically less costly for authors to cite superfluous references, whether of their own volition or prompted by editors, than it is to ignore relevant ones, rankings based on citations may be easily manipulated. In contrast, when the merits of publication in one journal or another are debated during hiring, promotion, and salary decisions, the evaluators are choosing over actions with costly consequences. We therefore look to the academic labor market, using data on economists in the University of California system to relate their lifetime publications in 700 different academic journals to salary. We test amongst various sets of journal rankings, and publication discount rates, to see which are most congruent with the returns implied by the academic labor market. (JEL A14, I23, J44)     

Seeing the Insane in Textbooks of Abnormal Psychology: The Uses of Art in Histories of Mental Illness

Pictures in historical chapters of textbooks convey information about the values and assumptions of the authors'professions and the larger culture. We scrutinized 15 recent abnormal psychology textbooks for reproductions of art created before 1900. Thirteen works appeared in three (20%) or more textbooks. Overall, these pictures support a "Whiggish" account of history that celebrates the present and gives a distorted, incomplete rendering of the past. The 13 pictures tended to depict the mentally ill as an underclass who are released from their literal and metaphorical shackles by men who are "ahead of their time" in their struggles against prevailing ignorance. The pictures also emphasized the difference of the mentally ill by presenting a catalogue of stereotypic visual elements attributed to insanity throughout Western history. We argue for the inclusion in textbooks of "history for the sake of the past" as a way of genuinely engaging different ideologies and thereby stimulating interest in our own implicit values and biases.     

Occupational Stress in Social Work

Correspondence to Faith Gibson, Senior Lecturer in Social Work, University of Ulster at Magee College, Londonderry, Co. Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Summary This article reports the results of a study of occupationalstress undertaken with a large sample of Northern Ireland fieldsocial workers, including both main grade practitioners andfirst line senior social work managers employed as team leaders.This study formed part of a wider interprofessional study ofsocial workers, nurses and teachers; publications for the lattertwo professions along with interprofessional comparisons arein preparation and this present article focuses on the socialworker cohort. The design and methods are described and demographic characteristicsof the social work sample are provided, with their views aboutsocial work. Stressors are identified in both professional andprivate lives. The effects of stress as manifested through theGeneral Health Questionnaire and the Maslach Burnout Inventoryare examined and the social workers' views on various stresscoping strategies are discussed.     

ANTI-SEMITIC ATTITUDES OF THE MASS PUBLIC: ESTIMATES AND EXPLANATIONS BASED ON A SURVEY OF THE MOSCOW OBLAST

In this article we examine anti-Semitism as expressed by a sampleof residents of the Moscow Oblast (Soviet Union). Based on asurvey conducted in 1920, we begin by describing anti-Jewishprejudice and support for official discrimination against Jews.We discover a surprisingly low level of expressed anti-Semitismamong these Soviet respondents and virtually no support forstate policies that discriminate against Jews. At the same time,many of the conventional hypotheses predicting anti-Semitismare supported in the Soviet case. Anti-Semitism is concentratedamong those with lower levels of education, those whose personalfinancial condition is deteriorating, and those who oppose furtherdemocratization of the Soviet Union. We do not take these findingsas evidence that anti-Semitism is a trivial problem in the SovietUnion but, rather, suggest that efforts to combat anti-Jewishmovements would likely receive considerable support from ordinarySoviet people.     

Profit from the Priceless: Heritage Sites,Property Rights and the Duty to Preserve

This article suggests that corporate responsibility should be interpreted to include concern about resources that cannot easily be treated as commodities. Heritage Sites are places of historical and cultural importance. Given the primacy of contingent valuation methods in creating policy, these sites are often at risk from development or tourism since there is pressure to treat them as revenue centers. The article moves to looking at the status of sites in terms of property rights, drawing on Locke's original formulation. The article concludes that there is a normative justification for treating these sites as collective property that may warrant maintenance, preservation and restricted access.