Doing Economics

2.9 Writing for the Right Journal
All of the foregoing is geared toward writing papers that can be submitted
(and hopefully published) in peer-reviewed journals. Though I will have
more to say in chapter 4 about where to submit on navigating the peer-
review process, this naturally raises the question of whether you should
write with a specific journal in mind.
Some people say that you should write with a specific journal in mind;
others say you should just write the paper, see how it turns out, and then
think about where to submit.
I do not really have an opinion on the matter, except for the following: I
strive to write for an (imaginary) audience composed of PhD economists,
but an audience of PhD economists who are not familiar with my field.
Here, think of your classmates during your first-year core courses, most of
whom probably ended up in different fields. As such, I tend to write for a
more general reader. I am convinced that even when you end up submitting
an article to a field journal,
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writing for a general audience helps. The
editor, for instance, might be in your field, but might not be familiar with
your specific topic, so writing for a general audience can help convince her
that your work is of general enough interest within your field. Likewise,
writing for a general audience might help you attract readers who would
otherwise not read your article by making it accessible to them, which
ultimately leads to your work being cited more often.
If you want to write for a specific journal, however, here are a few
general guidelines, in no particular order.
If you plan on submitting to a field journal, make sure that you actually
cite a good number of articles published in that journal or close substitutes
(e.g., Economic Development and Cultural Change for the Journal of
Development Economics, or Labour Economics for the Journal of Labor
Economics) and in that field over the last five years, and more recently if
possible. This does two things. First, citing articles published in that journal
serves to convince the editor, who has to decide whether to desk reject your
paper or send it out for review, that your paper should be sent out for review
because it is likely a good fit with what the journal publishes. Second, citing
articles recently published in that journal helps the editor select reviewers
for your paper.

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If you only cite older articles published in your target journal, odds are
the journal has moved on from publishing on that topic (probably because
the topic is no longer of interest to readers), which makes it more likely that
the editor will desk reject. If she does choose to send your paper out for
review, it might be difficult for her to find the right reviewers, because the
people who have published on that topic in her journal are likely to have
moved on to other topics and to get cranky about having to review papers
on it.
If you do not cite articles in your target journal, even if the editor decides
that it is a good fit for that journal, you run the risk of getting reviewers
suggested by a keyword search. For instance, I once had to handle a trade
manuscript which only cited the works of Jagdish Bhagwati, Paul Krugman,
Marc Melitz, and so on, without citing any work in the journal I was
handling it for (or in any close substitute journal, for that matter). When
they are not familiar with a given topic, editors start thinking about
reviewers by looking at the references of a paper. Here, the issue is that
Bhagwati, Krugman, and Melitz probably do not have time to referee for
field journals, especially field journals that are not ostensibly about
international trade. So how did I get reviewers? By doing a keyword search
(e.g., “international trade”) in the editorial system. This returned a few
hundred candidate reviewers, and I selected two or three of them. But I am
pretty sure none of those reviewers had seen the paper before. And therein
lies the rub: one of the unfortunate, unstated truths about this profession is
that network effects sadly matter, and reviewers are more likely to be
favorable toward your paper if they have seen it before, preferably in a
seminar or at a conference where they had an opportunity to ask their
questions about the work.
If you plan on submitting to a field journal, it is thus important to cite
articles that have been published recently in that or closely related journals.
How about general journals? Here, opinions differ. When submitting to a
top-five journal,
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it is best to minimize the number of citations to field
journals, because some general-journal editors conclude when they see that
an article citing too many articles in field journals that that article also
belongs in a field journal.
Given the foregoing, two approaches work reasonably well. The first
approach is that you write your paper with a specific target journal in mind,

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because you know that that journal has recently been publishing articles on
your topic.
The second approach is to just write the paper without a specific outlet in
mind, but still keeping the average economist in mind. Once you are “done”
writing your paper, you then look at your list of references. If there are
some field journals you cite more than three times, those are all good
candidates regarding where to submit. Once again, if your work improves
on both the internal validity and external validity fronts, you should start
with a more general economics journal. Know, however, that even the very
best papers have a low probability of getting into those journals, as the
competition is fierce—and it is getting fiercer.