Competition between academic journals for scholars’ attention: the ‘Nature effect’ in scholarly communication

Here, we study readers’ choice in a context in which scholar’s attention is drawn to salient attributes of academic papers such as importance or accessibility. An article’s attribute is salient when it stands out among the paper’s attributes relative to that attribute’s average level in the choice set. In our model, scholars may attach disproportionately high consideration to salient attributes of academic articles. This paper shows that,...