LGS7 - Part I.: Salles on the impossibility of liberalism

I am often annoyed if I miss an interesting conference.  In this post I report on LGS7 – the 7th Conference on Logic Game Theoryand Social Choice, held last week in Bucharest. Of course this post will not help me with missed conferences, but hopefully other game theorists will find them interesting.

There are two types of conferences. The big ones, like the EEA-ESEM meetings, where you can network with a lot of new people, but honestly, with most of them, you are not likely to meet ever again. There are also the small, field conferences, where there is always the risk that you meet all the same people as last year (this can also be nice, too), who give a talk you already know. LGS is the third kind, as it collects people from different disciplines (logicians, game theorists, social choice theorists, but also sociologists, computer scientists) with very specialised interests. As it is organised biannually, it is also unlikely that you will hear an updated version of what you have heard last year.

The World Cup of Economics Journals

Even this week I got an email informing me about the latest impact factors (IF) of some journals. What's in a number?

The IF of a journal for a given year is calculated as the number of citations to the papers published in the preceding two years, divided by the number of papers published in those years. This measure was originally introduced by Garfield to highlight journals that are hot. The index has been calculated annually ever since and for an ever increasing set of journals. As this indicator is readily available (for a non-negligible fee!), people started to use it as a quality indicator. A journal with a higher IF was (and is) considered better. A paper in a journal with a higher IF was considered better. A researcher with papers in journals with higher IFs was considered better. A department with researchers with papers in journals with higher IFs was considered better.

In a sense everyone was right. Ceteris paribus, a journal with a higher IF has a greater impact (whatever that means) and is therefore better in some sense. Unfortunately the IF is not only about quality, but many other things.