Does Publication Timing Affect Citations and Circulation?

The NBER is amazingly consistent with the release of their working paper series. Every Monday at 12 am, the new list arrives in my inbox (I have yet to experience the epsilon probability world in which it does not, as in Rubenstein (1989)). Unlike most organizations, the NBER keeps this schedule even through the holiday season. As we continue through this period filled with food, football, and everyone’s favorite: family, papers are continually released as new working papers or publications potentially delayed by backlogs and administrative processes. This raises a natural question: are these papers’ circulation or citations being affected by their release date?

The NBER is aware of this sort of systematic bias as they shifted their working paper emails away from alphabetical order to random order in 2014. Papers listed first in the email were later found to have 30% more views, downloads, and citations (Feenberg et al. 2017). The well-known advantage of having an early-alphabet last-name motivated Ray ⓡ Robson (2018) to create the certified random order in which the authors randomly assign the order of their names themselves before circulation. These patterns reflect the primacy effect operating even among economists, consistent with Rubinstein and Salant (2006), Carlsson, Mørkbak, and Olsen (2012), and Day et al. (2012).

Building on this, the timing of a paper release or publication may itself affect circulation and citations. Papers released during the holidays or summer break may receive less attention as academics balance travel, family, and other commitments. This may delay viewing of NBER emails. Once back from the holidays, there are a handful of working paper emails to sort through all at once or never at all. Lusher, Yang, and Carrell (2023) provide evidence of crowding out among NBER working paper lists amplifying this effect.

Of course, the effect could run in the opposite direction if the decrease in papers released is more than the decrease in attention economists give them during the holidays and Summer. Unfortunately, this question is likely unanswerable for several reasons: (1) endogeneity, as academics attempt to time their papers’ release to coincide with more attention. I try to do this with the release of my posts such this one. (2) The increasingly long and irregular gap between when a paper is written, circulated, and released as a working paper or published, as described in Ellison 2002. (3) Potential omitted variable bias, since circulating a working paper before publication may increase citations in ways correlated with the eventual publication itself (Wohlrabe and Bürgi 2020).