Doing Economics

4.12 Once Your Article Is Accepted
When your article is accepted, you should again make sure to set time aside
to celebrate by treating yourself to something you would not normally do.
As I mentioned earlier, those little victories are rather scarce, and if we fail
to celebrate them as they happen, soon enough we are mourning another
loss. Once you are done celebrating, the wait begins for your article’s galley
proofs—the draft version of your typeset article. Those proofs will typically
be sent by the journal publisher’s production department, which tends to be
almost entirely orthogonal to the journal’s editorial team. Consistent with
that orthogonality, the production people will typically require that you
return your corrected proofs, along with your answers to their own queries
(e.g., “When you cited Stiglitz (1974), did you mean Stiglitz (1974) in
REStud, QJE, AER, or JPE?”)
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in most cases within 48 hours.
Here, my one recommendation is to arm yourself with patience.
Manuscripts are typeset by people who are neither economists nor writers.
Very often, because of outsourcing, they are typeset by people for whom
English is a second language. To make matters worse, each publisher now
requires you to make corrections to your galley proofs using an unusually
cumbersome online system which does not necessarily allow you to see
what your article will actually look like on paper. It can be extremely
frustrating to have to explain basic grammar to the one person standing
between you and a published article, and it can be maddening to have to
figure out how to align an entire column of coefficients and standard errors
along the decimal point on a web-based application you are unlikely to use
more than five times in your entire life. But the incentives are clearly
aligned for you to do the best you can, and to do it within 48 hours.