Generally, Academic Sequitur finds papers as soon as they are posted online. Increasingly, journals are posting papers as soon as they are accepted and correctly formatted (some even before then!), which means that when the “official” new issue is announced, the papers it consists of could have been hanging out on the web for months without being publicized. This month, I checked just how large this lag can be by seeing when Academic Sequitur found papers that were included in journals’ most recent issues.
I checked the top 5 economics journals: American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, and Review of Economic Studies. For the January 2019 issue of AER, the included articles were all added to our database between July 10 and August 27, 2018 (corresponding to the dates they were posted). For the February 2019 issue of QJE, we found all the articles between August 20 and October 25, 2018. For the December 2018 issue of Econometrica, articles were found between June 4and December 12, 2018. For the December issue of the Journal of Political Economy, we located all articles between August 2 and November 21, 2018. Finally, for Review of Economic Studies, articles from the January 2019 issue were located between January 28, 2018 (yes, almost a year early!) and November 28, 2018.
Our users find out about articles at the time they are posted, not when they get grouped into an issue after languishing online for months. And I think that’s a huge plus!