March Madness and Academic Production

March Madness is here! Things will get a lot more intense once the field of 64 is selected, but for the die-hard college basketball fan the "dance" has already begun with the wall-to-wall coverage of conference tournaments.

So what kind of an affect will all of the hoopla have on the production of scholarship?

According to this recent study conducted at Duke University the number of academic articles viewed in college libraries drops considerably during the NCAA tournament.

Charles Clotfelter, Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, used data from 78 research libraries in the U.S. to determine the number of articles viewed from February through April in 2006, 2007 and 2008. The number of articles viewed on Monday through Wednesday of those weeks averaged more than 1,000 a day per library.

Clotfelter found that the number of articles viewed through the JSTOR digital repository of academic journals increased an average rate of 5 percent a week in the weeks leading up to “Selection Sunday,” but fell 6 percent in the week right after the NCAA field was announced. The following week, library usage resumed its increase, at a rate of 3 percent a week.

“I observed similar patterns in each of the three years, 2006 to 2008, and the post-selection dip occurred both in libraries not connected to universities with Division I teams as well as those with them,” said Clotfelter, who is currently writing a book about the role of big-time athletics in American universities. “This drop in research activity in these libraries is quantitative evidence of the NCAA tournament’s power to influence patterns of work.”

Clotfelter also measured the impact of library usage at universities whose teams won “toss-up” games, those with no clear favorite, and compared that to schools that lost such games. He found that at winning schools, daily article viewing fell by 10 percent in the seven days after the game and even more, 14 percent, through the end of the tournament, compared to schools whose teams lost these games.

I wonder how much this has to do with the fact that many colleges and universities are on Spring Break during this time of year.