Chris Peterson

When the NYT linked to Saving Face (my thesis), I saw thousands and thousands of downloads from my server – I think I calculated at the time that it would’ve made it the 7th most downloaded article ever from SSRN.

A few days ago, I was informed that Losing Face (my revised article) had made the top ten list for (recent) articles in the eBusiness & eCommerce eJournal.

I also found out that Losing Face has been already cited in three peer-reviewed papers, including one in First Monday and two law review articles.

While I’m honored that so many folks have found my writing to be interesting and useful, it is a bit ironic that Losing Face appears to be good enough to be widely read and well-cited but not good enough to merit publication on its own, at least judging by the stream of rejections from law reviews to which I’ve submitted. Guess not having a J.D. is a bigger issue than I’d hoped…

On SSRN now. Here’s my profile, and here’s Losing Face on SSRN.

Speaking of which, I’m considering pointing all the links to Losing Face on this site to the SSRN version (rather than to where it is stored on bepress or my server).

On the one hand, I’m thinking that this might be worth it as a sort of publicity thing: if I suddenly get a bunch of downloads, it would be better to have them all on one version for the purposes of it getting noticed, rather than have it spread out across several versions. (The version of Saving Face linked to by the NYT got several thousand downloads, and would’ve made it one of the most downloaded articles on SSRN of all time!)

On the other hand, I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort, and I sort of like having easy control any time I want to make an incremental change and not have to worry about sitting through the SSRN review process.

Anyone out there have any advice? Does it really matter?