From a distance it seems obvious – in the vast space of interesting topics, academics clump around a few familiar themes, neglecting vast territories between the currently fashionable clumps. This is sure how it seems to outsiders and students, at least for fields like social science or literature, fields which must cover a vast territory. For example, economists have thousands of papers on auctions, and hardly any papers on romance, even though most people think romance far more interesting and important than auctions.
But up close, academics don’t seem to see it that way. Journal referees usually reject submissions on the neglected topics as "uninteresting," in favor of variations on the current fashionable topics, which referees call "interesting." Thus outsiders disagree with insiders on what topics are "interesting."
Outsiders complain that clumping comes from insiders rewarding papers that build on their own work, no matter how obscure. But insiders say only they know the details which are crucial to deciding what is most interesting. How can we decide between these two views?
Added: Socially valuable reasons academics could clump include focusing on rare productive areas, and local scale economies of work, competition, and evaluation.
This link is 403ing. Does anyone know what this experiment was?
**edit** internet archive has a copy:
https://web.archive.org/web... among others.
It's a journal for papers that were rejected from other math journals.
***edit***; Issue 1 : https://web.archive.org/web...***edit***; Issue 2 : https://web.archive.org/web...
Why is such an overwhelming majority of comments directed at editors? After all, at least in biology, there are thousands of journals to choose from, many directed at the most obscure niches you can imagine.
The elephant in the room is funding. At least in biology, most basic research is funded by the government, which tremendously influences research priorities. Want to get funded? Study cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, bio-terrorism, or drug abuse. Diabetes and metabolic syndrome have become big in recent years.
On the bright side, scientists are smarter that bureaucrats, and will do their best to study what interests them by repackaging it as superficially relating to the purpose of a grant: "sure, we'll study diabetes, using these mutant mice that happen to also have signs of delayed aging..."
Carl Shulman: retraining incentives do exist. For example, I've been told that it's easier to get some NIH training grants if you are segueing from one sub-field to another rather than just continuing to study as a post-doc what you studied as a grad student.