O papel dos bloggers no avanço das ciências econômicas

The Impact of Economics Blogs
David McKenzie
Berk Özler
The World Bank
Development Research Group
Conclusions:
"... Economic blogs are doing more than providing a new source of
procrastination for writers and readers. Using a variety of empirical approaches,
we have provided the first quantitative evidence that they are having impacts.
There are large impacts on dissemination of research  – a link on a popular blog
results in a substantial increase in abstract views and downloads, while a majority
of economics blog readers say they have read a new paper in the past month as a
result of a blog.  There also appear to be benefits in terms of the bloggers
becoming better known and more respected within the profession  – bloggers are
over-represented relative to their academic publication records in a poll of
favorite economists, and readers of a new blog have become more aware of the
researchers writing it.  Finally, we find some evidence  from our experiment that
blogs influence attitudes and knowledge: readers of the new Development Impact
blog think more highly of World Bank research and are more interested in working in this institution, and the average reader may have gained knowledge
about the contents of recent research papers as a result of reading this blog.
The fact that blog posts are available worldwide immediately after posting
poses challenges for evaluating their impact. A further contribution of this paper
is therefore in illustrating a variety of methods that can be used to assess the
impacts of a blog. These methods can therefore be readily adapted in future work
to consider the impact of other economics blogs not considered here, as well as
blogs in other academic disciplines.
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