Monday, June 22, 2020

Journals in Behavioural Science and Policy

There have been various streams of interaction between economics, psychology, and policy over the centuries. The development of the disciplines of psychology and economics in the 19th and 20th centuries saw the development of specialist journals in each field, including the key general journals (as well as textbooks) that cemented these disciplines as separate areas of inquiry. Work at the intersection of economics and psychology is evident in these journals throughout the middle of the twentieth century where the separation of the disciplines was most rigid but did not appear in a very systematic fashion before the 1960s. After the pioneering work of scholars such as Herbert Simon and a wide range of scholars in judgment and decision-making, and experimental economics, a number of journals began to appear in the 1970s and 1980s with an emphasis on the intersection of economics and psychology. Below are two of the key field journals that have traditionally been key outlets for scholars interested in behavioural and psychological aspects of economics. While much of the key work cited in fields such as behavioural economics continued to be published in the core economics, psychology, and management journals, as well as general science journals, the existence of dedicated interdisciplinary journals provided key outlets to develop a range of literatures.
JEBO: The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization is devoted to theoretical and empirical research concerning economic decision, organization and behavior and to economic change in all its aspects. Its specific purposes are to foster an improved understanding of how human cognitive, computational and informational characteristics influence the working of economic organizations and market economies and how an economy's structural features lead to various types of micro and macro behavior, to changing patterns of development and to institutional evolution. Research with these purposes that explore the interrelations of economics with other disciplines such as biology, psychology, law, anthropology, sociology, finance, marketing, political science, and mathematics is particularly welcome. The journal is eclectic as to research method; systematic observation and careful description, simulation modeling and mathematical analysis are all within its purview. Empirical work, including controlled laboratory experimentation that probes close to the core of the issues in theoretical dispute is encouraged.
Journal of Economic Psychology:  The Journal aims to present research that will improve understanding of behavioral, in particular psychological, aspects of economic phenomena and processes. The Journal seeks to be a channel for the increased interest in using behavioral science methods for the study of economic behavior, and so to contribute to better solutions of societal problems, by stimulating new approaches and new theorizing about economic affairs. Economic psychology as a discipline studies the psychological mechanisms that underlie economic behavior. It deals with preferences, judgments, choices, economic interaction, and factors influencing these, as well as the consequences of judgements and decisions for economic processes and phenomena. This includes the impact of economic institutions upon human behavior and well-being. Studies in economic psychology may relate to different levels of aggregation, from the household and the individual consumer to the macro level of whole nations. Economic behavior in connection with inflation, unemployment, taxation, economic development, as well as consumer information and economic behavior in the market place are thus among the fields of interest. The journal also encourages submissions dealing with social interaction in economic contexts, like bargaining, negotiation, or group decision-making. The Journal of Economic Psychology contains: (a) novel reports of empirical (including: experimental) research on economic behavior; (b) replications studies; (c) assessments of the state of the art in economic psychology; (d) articles providing a theoretical perspective or a frame of reference for the study of economic behavior; (e) articles explaining the implications of theoretical developments for practical applications; (f) book reviews; (g) announcements of meetings, conferences and seminars. Special issues of the Journal may be devoted to themes of particular interest. Once per year an open call for proposals for a special issue is announced. The Journal will encourage exchange of information between researchers and practitioners by being a forum for discussion and debate of issues in both theoretical and applied research. The journal is published under the auspices of the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology http://www.iarep.org. The aim of the Association is to promote interdisciplinary work relating to economic behavior.
A later journal that also publishes a significant amount of work in these areas is Judgment and Decision-Making.
This is the journal of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) and the European Association for Decision Making (EADM). It is open access, published on the World Wide Web, at least every two months. The study of judgment and decision making (JDM) concerns normative, descriptive and prescriptive analysis of human judgments and decisions. These topics may be studied from theoretical or applied perspectives, with the use of experiments, surveys, analysis of existing data, and other necessary approaches. Contributions to the journal will fall within these bounds and reflect issues central to JDM, including, but not limited to those in this list. The field of JDM is inter-disciplinary, so the journal covers relevant content from several fields, including cognitive psychology, experimental economics, and experimental philosophy. We expect contributions to be accessible to readers in at least these fields.
In the last few years, a number of new journals have emerged specifically at the intersection of economics, psychology, and policy. These journals reflect an increasing interest in policy applications of behavioural research literatures. The development of these journals potentially represents a very positive development for people with particular interests in policy applications in these areas and a key route to develop the foundations of these fields. The extent to which publication in these journals will be weighted in the various processes that determine career advancement in our fields is obviously an important question and one to think about if you are building an academic career in these areas.
Behavioral Science & Policy is an international, peer-reviewed journal that features short, accessible articles describing actionable policy applications of behavioral scientific research that serves the public interest. Articles submitted to BSP undergo a dual-review process. Leading Scholars from specific disciplinary areas review articles to assess their scientific rigor; at the same time, experts in relevant policy areas evaluate them for relevance and feasibility of implementation. Manuscripts that pass this dual-review are edited to ensure their accessibility to scientists, policy makers, and lay readers. BSP is not limited to a particular point of view or political ideology. BSP is a publication of the Behavioral Science & Policy Association and the Brookings Institution Press.
Journal of Behavioral Public Administration (JBPA) is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary open access journal that focuses on behavioral and experimental research in public administration, broadly defined. JBPA encourages submissions of both basic scholarly and applied work conducted by academics or practitioners.
Behavioural Public Policy is an interdisciplinary and international peer-reviewed journal devoted to behavioural research and its relevance to public policy. The study of human behaviour is important within many disciplinary specialties and in recent years the findings from this field have begun to be applied to policy concerns in a substantive and sustained way. BPP seeks to be multidisciplinary and therefore welcomes articles from economists, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, legal scholars and others, so long as their work relates the study of human behaviour directly to a policy concern. BPP focuses on high-quality research which has international relevance and which is framed such that the arguments are accessible to a multidisciplinary audience of academics and policy makers.
Journal of Behavioural Economics for Policy: Behavioral economics is the integration of economic theory and other related disciplines including but not limited to psychology, neuro-science, finance, biology, sociology, anthropology, political science, and law. Behavioral economics is inherently interdisciplinary. The purpose of this interdisciplinary research is to better understand human behavior. Our unique focus is the implications of behavioral economics for public policy, and a framework for policy makers. Every aspect of behavioral economics and all aspects of public policy are within our purview. We welcome contributions to all fields of knowledge listed above, and beyond, provided they show the public policy implications of behavioral economics. We are open to a wide range of methodological approaches, provided they lead to scientifically grounded conclusions. Experiments, surveys, meta-analyses, case studies, simulation-based analyses, economic and social theory, randomized control trials, and literature reviews (to name but a few common approaches) are all welcome. Arguments may be based on a variety of theoretical frameworks, including those which do not assume fully rational behavior. Empirical results should be both theoretically grounded and both economically and statistically significant. However, the math and the tables and graphs showing statistical results should be placed in an appendix. We welcome replications of existing papers, and are particularly open to “non-results”, which may be of great practical and scientific value yet are less likely to reach the audience of most academic journals.
Similarly, the Nature group of journals launched the journal Nature Human Behaviour, which has become a significant outlet for publication at work at the intersection of economics, psychology, and policy. The development of a general-interest journal in this broad area is potentially very significant for the development of interdisciplinary work in these fields.
Nature Human Behaviour publishes research of outstanding significance into any aspect of human behaviour: its psychological, biological, and social bases, as well as its origins, development, and disorders. The journal aims to enhance the visibility of research into human behaviour, strengthening its societal reach and impact.

No comments: