u/InevitableLiving779

Today, I saw an advertisement on a social app, which was calling for papers on Game Theory and LLM. I didn't hear of this journal's name much before except for when scrolling through some papers for potential citations.

Then I came to know that it's published by MDPI. I asked the theorists at my department and they said they didn't hear of it much either as most of them mainly publish in AER: Microeconomics, JET, ET, Econometrica, JME, or GEB.

Some peers from some other STEM departments consider MDPI as a predatory publisher and disregard any paper out there. Though some people in Computer Science department also see it as a legitimate journal. But I wonder how this journal is generally viewed in Economics? Is publication or papers here seen negatively?

Recently, a reddit post in https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1tks4mz/has_anyone_seen_the_discourse_on_twitter_about/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

stated that they read many tweets about how in some fields like economics, it's common to cite papers without even reading them. I didn't see any tweets like that yet nor can I verify how true this is.

But at my department, at least for theoretical economics (where I work on mostly), I saw it quite opposite. We have to be very aware of the specific models, assumptions, and mechanisms of previous papers and often include in footnotes as well regarding how our results compared to their logic or how a previous paper proved a specific lemma etc.

Even in my current auction theory working paper, I had to carefully read all the papers I cited because I had to show the specific points of their paper's mechanism and compare it with mine. Not much sure about how it works in applied microeconomics or other subfields, but at least for microeconomic theory, I experienced rather opposite. Of course, we don't need to read everything in a paper but only the sections that are important or we're gonna cite/use.

At least ArXiv now bans people who use AI to hallucinate citations and at least even misquoting might be better than quoting something that doesn't even exist in the first place as AI gives out so much fake papers.

What do you think? Is it really that common in Economics?