Final Paper - Wayne State University: Fill & Download for Free

One of my favorites is this paper written by four economists about sharing the same last names.Title: A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist CoauthorsAuthors:Allen C. Goodman, Wayne State UniversityJoshua Goodman, Harvard UniversityLucas Goodman, University of MarylandSarena Goodman, Federal Reserve BoardAbstract:We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus.The paper is a few pages long and talks about the various impacts of sharing the same name and further research. The conclusion is a great summary though.Conclusion:This paper is the first coauthored by four non-related surname-sharing economists. Our main contribution is showing that such a collaboration is feasible. We also note that, for papers with more than two coauthors, surname-sharing eliminates the “et al” penalty documented by Simcoe and Waguespack (2011). Though the many expected citations to this paper will refer to it as Goodman et al. (2015), such citations will provide equal amounts of publicity to all of us coauthors.Future breakthroughs on this topic should be possible. We believe much could be learned if only economists John Turner (University of Georgia), Lesley Turner (University of Maryland), Nicholas Turner (U.S. Treasury Department) and Sarah Turner (University of Virginia) would find a way to work together. Substantial progress might also come from collaboration between Janet Smith (Claremont McKenna College), Jeffrey Smith (University of Michigan), Jeremy Smith (University of Warwick), and Jonathan Smith (College Board), whose work could explore the impact of both surname-sharing and first initial-sharing. Finally, we encourage cousins Erzo F.P. Luttmer (Dartmouth College) and Erzo G.J. Luttmer (University of Minnesota) to consider collaborating for reasons too obvious to state.11 This area seems ripe for exploration.

Since it is an assignment, the correct answer is: ask the person who’s marking it.But a doctoral thesis is, in general, moderately reliable. That is, it’s better than making something up out of thin air, but you’d be better off still citing a peer-reviewed article.This is because the process of getting a thesis passed is usually much kinder than peer reviewing an article:Supervisors want their PhD students to pass, even (especially!) the terrible ones; editors suffer no such compassions with submitted articles.Thesis readers are carefully chosen, and even the most objective ones have an entire book to pore over; an article peer-reviewer has far more time to devote to far less material, and is under no obligation to give even a fair hearing.The overarching argument of a thesis can bolster less impressive points; but each chapter, distilled into an article, must stand on its own.There are exceptions, of course — please, cite Non-Cooperative Games — but that’s the general situation. Almost anything useful from a PhD thesis also lives in the academic wilds as a peer-reviewed paper, so cite that instead. And don’t assume that just because a peer-reviewed paper exists with the approximate title of a thesis chapter, the paper will have the same content as the thesis — peer review can call for extensive changes that aren’t reflected in the thesis.I know, I know, theses are usually free to access and peer-reviewed articles usually aren’t, but this is one case where you get what you pay for. (What you paid the publishers, that is — we scientists get next to nothing. It’s a travesty.)As an example, the last chapter of my own PhD thesis still has not seen the light as even a paper draft. This is mostly the fault of my dear-heaven-above-it’s-eleven-please-sleep baby, but it also reflects lingering uncertainties hanging over some corners of the logic I employed. Don’t cite it. When I finally get it published (and get over my perfectionist hangups in the process), cite that!But as a counter-example, over the course of my PhD I found myself needing a reference for the melting thermodynamics of a variation on the DNA duplex in which one backbone (of the double helix) had been cut. A famous paper (SantaLucia 2004) prescribes how to calculate those temperatures, but the input values needed are found only in one obscure place: Nicolas Peyret’s 2000 PhD thesis from Wayne State University.As far as I can tell, those numbers have never been peer-reviewed, and I can see why: the kind of experiment that would use them would be fiddly enough that you’d want to do lots of internal calibration and replication anyway, using your own experimental conditions, and it was probably too much work for too little publication for the author to get it out into the world as an isolated article.So there you go: unless you’re citing Non-Cooperative Games or its equivalent, when you use a PhD thesis as a source, you are probably relying on information that, if it is valid (and wasn’t peer-reviewed), may be extremely specialized and useful in a very limited field of knowledge. Tread with caution.

I can tell you one things about U of W.The people gettings 70s and were not the best students in the class started getting on average ~15% higher at Wayne State after they transferred. I can tell you when I look at my brothers study material, they actually get assignments? Not just a midterm and a final? Maybe 2 midterms? or 1 paper, 1 midterm and a final? To be fair, a U of W 90% is wayyyyy harder to get than a Wayne State 90% but it is also viewed differently. Look up the GPA conversion charts for U of W. That being said, sometimes when you are applying to post grad and they see your marks compared to other schools, you will lose out big time.