Think tank wars.

• Position: Letters To The Editor

To the Editor:

We are somewhat underwhelmed by an "analysis" ("Think Tanks: Who's Hot and Who's Not," Fall 2002) by an Institute for International Economics scholar, Adam Posen, that purports to show IIE as the second most quoted economic think tank. At a minimum, the methodology is sloppy, with no explanation of its rationale. Why Foreign Affairs? Isn't including the International Herald Tribune with the New York Times and Washington Post double counting? Why Business Week but not Forbes or Fortune? Further, it's inexplicable that Cato's most quoted economist, Steve Moore, was excluded from the survey.

The International Economy is a fine magazine, so I'm surprised that you didn't consider the fact that the IIE came in 22nd out of 25 think tanks surveyed this year by FAIR in a far more extensive study. I believe it is odd that Brookings, Cato, and the American Enterprise Institute would be in the top four (along with the Heritage Foundation) in the FAIR study and that the only significant change was for IIE to move from 22nd to 2nd in its study. I would suggest you'd be on safer ground to limit these kinds of surveys to those undertaken by independent organizations.

EDWARD H. CRANE President Cato Institute Washington, D.C. Adam Posen responds:

We are glad to have the opportunity to respond to Mr. Crane's critical but unfounded assertions about the validity of our study of media citations of think tanks. This allows us both to clarify the methods we used in our research, and to correct those data errors and omissions which were brought to our attention since the data underlying our results were publicly posted (on the IIE website).

First, comparing the FAIR study of total media mentions of think tanks to our analysis misses the basic point--ours was a study of citations of economics think tanks and scholars of economic issues. Simply putting the word "Heritage" or "Brookings" without any specific scholars or subjects into a search engine, as the FAIR study does, lumps together every citation on every topic and does not serve the purpose that either we or The International Economy had in mind. We do not purport to study overall think tank mentions and explicitly acknowledge our limited focus in the article.

Second, any list of publications will in some sense be arbitrary. Why is it less arbitrary to take the Lexis/Nexis database's default list of "Major Newspapers and Transcripts" (which is what the FAIR study does) than to design a representative sample? Our sample of eleven publications consciously draws from a range of political views and selects those with wide readership and real economics coverage. Meanwhile, any search limited to Lexis/Nexis systematically undercounts certain publications, and double-counts others, which is why, as we explain in our methodology statement (also posted on the IIE website), we used both Lexis/Nexis and Dow Jones services for our searches. This is not a criticism of the FAIR methodology but underscores that search design is a choice along a tradeoff, wherein some conscious design may well be justified depending upon the study's goal.

Incidentally, Mr. Crane's misconception about the International Herald Tribune is another example of why we put such careful effort into our study design. Including citations in the International Herald Tribune and the Washington Post or the New York Times is not a double-count because they reach different subscriber bases and because there is no automatic reprint of Washington Post or New York Times...