Social Science Research Network

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a website devoted to the promotion of scholarship in the social sciences, particularly the fields of economics, finance, accounting, management and law. SSRN was founded by Michael Jensen (a financial economist) and is run by him and other scholars.

Academic papers can be posted by the author as a PDF document on SSRN. Academics can subscribe to e-mail newsletter covering various subject matters and will then periodically receive emails providing the abstracts of papers recently submitted to SSRN in the respective field, and a link to the paper.

Since its foundation in late 1994, SSRN has grown in importance in the academic community. In economics, and to some degree in law (especially in the field of law and economics), almost all papers are now first published as preprints on SSRN and/or on other paper distribution networks such as RePEc before being submitted to an academic journal.

Authors and papers on SSRN are ranked by their number of downloads, which has become an informal indicator of popularity on prepress and open access sites.^[1]

SSRN, like other preprint services, circulate publications throughout the scholarly community at an early stage, permitting the author to incorporate comments into the final version of the paper before its publication in a journal. Moreover even if access to the published paper is restricted, access to the original working paper remains open through SSRN.

[edit] References

^ See Bernard S. Black and Paul Caron, "Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance", SSRN ID # 784764 (proposing that SSRN's download measure can be useful in ranking scholarly performance of law faculty).