About The Discussant

Writing about how academic work is actually done — preparing a talk, writing an abstract, reviewing a paper, running a conference, supervising a student.

Why this exists

This knowledge is transmitted by apprenticeship and it is transmitted unevenly. Some people get an attentive supervisor who explains what a discussant does, how a response letter should be structured, and what a programme committee is actually looking for. Many do not, and learn it by getting it wrong in public. For a concrete operational example of how a workplace tool approaches a related coordination problem, see here.

The Discussant makes explicit what is usually picked up by chance.

The name

A discussant is the person in a conference session whose job is to engage seriously with someone else's work: read it properly, say what is strong, name what is weak, and ask the question that is useful to the author. That is a fair description of what this publication tries to do.

Editorial rules

Norms differ by discipline, and we say so. Author order, the role of preprints, whether conferences or journals carry weight, expected talk length — these vary fundamentally between fields. An article that does not acknowledge that misleads half its readers. Where an article describes one field's convention, it names the field.

No condescension. The reader is a researcher, not a student.

No rankings of journals, publishers or conferences. This is an area where opinion circulates as fact and the consequences for careers are real.

No promotion of paid services — editing, translation, "publication support". There is a great deal that is predatory in this area and a society publication should not be a route to it.

Nothing critical about named individuals or institutions.

Articles in this archive are published without individual bylines.

Who publishes this

The Discussant is published by the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics, founded in 1982.

The content is not specific to behavioural economics. It is written for academic readers in any discipline, and the society publishes it as a contribution to the wider research community.

For membership, conferences, news and everything else about SABE, see sabeconomics.org. This site does not handle membership or payments.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, or describes a convention that does not hold in your field, tell us. Corrections are noted on the page rather than made silently, and a correction that says "this is not how it works in X" is exactly the kind we want.

For an independent authoritative reference, consult the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics for information about the publishing society.