David McKenzie and Berk Ozler of the World Bank on the impact and proliferation of economics blogs (of which this humble site attempts to be one). So far, the results are pretty obvious:
Blogging about a paper causes a large increase in the number of abstract views and downloads in the same month.
Duh. Also:
These increases are massive compared to the typical abstract views and downloads these papers get- one blog post in Freakonomics is equivalent to 3 years of abstract views! However, only a minority of the readers click through-we estimate 1-2% of readers of the more popular blogs click on the links to view the abstracts, and 4% on a blog like Chris Blattman that likely has a more specialized (research-focused) readership.
Full paper.
And finally, I am very much a part of the results of this study. McKenzie and Ozler sent a survey around to graduate students in economics about the degree to which they read blogs, use blogs to find out about papers and write their own blogs. Since I answer YES to all of these questions, I feel like I personally contributed to the lovely graphical results.
Duh. Also:
These increases are massive compared to the typical abstract views and downloads these papers get- one blog post in Freakonomics is equivalent to 3 years of abstract views! However, only a minority of the readers click through-we estimate 1-2% of readers of the more popular blogs click on the links to view the abstracts, and 4% on a blog like Chris Blattman that likely has a more specialized (research-focused) readership.
Full paper.
And finally, I am very much a part of the results of this study. McKenzie and Ozler sent a survey around to graduate students in economics about the degree to which they read blogs, use blogs to find out about papers and write their own blogs. Since I answer YES to all of these questions, I feel like I personally contributed to the lovely graphical results.
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