The all-time record for the publication of peer-reviewed scholarly economics articles was held by the late Harry Johnson, who died in 1977. He published 526 articles, in addition to 41 books and pamphlets. He died at age 53. I doubt that this record will ever be broken by somebody age 53.
My friend Walter Block, age 76, has now beaten Johnson’s record: 528. He publishes something in the range of 25 articles a year. You can read about him on Wikipedia.
He now faces a major career decision. I have been reminding him of this for several years. His enormous legacy is scattered across academia. There are a lot of economics journals, most of them obscure, and he has at least one article in most of the obscure ones. The articles are not all online.
Every once in a while, like maybe every two days, he answers a letter submitted by one of his acolytes. They are published in Lew Rockwell.com’s blog section. Following the tradition of fans of the Grateful Dead, who were known as Deadheads, these acolytes have become known as Blockheads. They are pretty sharp students. They want him to comment on this or that topic. He comments on each topic by listing at least a dozen articles that he has written on the topic. There is no way that anybody else could have found all of these articles.
A CLEARING HOUSE SITE
He needs to create a site that gives people access to all of these articles. He needs to get permission from all of the publishers to allow him to provide a PDF of his articles that were published in their specific journals. I think most publishers would grant this permission. It would increase traffic to their websites. It would be to their advantage to do this. Since they are in the field of economics, they understand economic advantage.
The site must have a search engine that lets people search for a term or phrase to pull up all the articles relating to this term or phrase. I have such a search engine on my website.
This post was published at Gary North on December 26, 2017.
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