Even those who publish in top journals seem to score very low in their avg number of citations per publication.
Why do formal theorists get so few citations?
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Interestingly, prior generations of formal theorists got TONS of cites. They were writing fairy tales too. Can’t explain a change with a constant. So what changed?
Because the old-school formal theorists wrote on big ideas, and were able to clearly explain them in the papers even without a ton of math. Political scientists get influenced by formal theory if the ideas are powerful and explained well. Look at all the crap on audience costs. It generated tons of cites and follow-up papers because the basic idea is original, intuitive once you think about it, and powerful not solely because of the math.
You could respond that the information revolution of late-1980s / early-1990s just made these papers harder to read, but there are papers post-info revolution (e.g., Fearon, Krehbiel, etc.) that are really well cited and influenced empirical work.
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Interestingly, prior generations of formal theorists got TONS of cites. They were writing fairy tales too. Can’t explain a change with a constant. So what changed?
Because the old-school formal theorists wrote on big ideas, and were able to clearly explain them in the papers even without a ton of math. Political scientists get influenced by formal theory if the ideas are powerful and explained well. Look at all the crap on audience costs. It generated tons of cites and follow-up papers because the basic idea is original, intuitive once you think about it, and powerful not solely because of the math.
You could respond that the information revolution of late-1980s / early-1990s just made these papers harder to read, but there are papers post-info revolution (e.g., Fearon, Krehbiel, etc.) that are really well cited and influenced empirical work.Our field is perversely insecure. One formal supporter who doesn't do formal once told me that he didn't think a formal paper was very good because he understood the math. Obviously, as the literature builds, the work becomes more sophisticated, but many of the papers published are needlessly complicated because the incentives are skewed toward flexing mathematical muscle and away from generating novel insights.
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Interestingly, prior generations of formal theorists got TONS of cites. They were writing fairy tales too. Can’t explain a change with a constant. So what changed?
Because the old-school formal theorists wrote on big ideas, and were able to clearly explain them in the papers even without a ton of math. Political scientists get influenced by formal theory if the ideas are powerful and explained well. Look at all the crap on audience costs. It generated tons of cites and follow-up papers because the basic idea is original, intuitive once you think about it, and powerful not solely because of the math.
You could respond that the information revolution of late-1980s / early-1990s just made these papers harder to read, but there are papers post-info revolution (e.g., Fearon, Krehbiel, etc.) that are really well cited and influenced empirical work.Agreed that the original audience-cost formal model paper was original, good, and influential. I can't say that about all the quantitative experiments that followed.
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I'd say that good formal theorists in polisci (not more than a dozen) get cited because they address interesting questions in creative, illuminating ways. But the rest are deeply ignorant and stupidly arrogant; they just happened to be relatively skilled in math.
you got it right.