Doing Economics

4.2 When to Submit?
As I noted above, after writing up your paper and presenting it to diverse
audiences, the time has come for you to submit it for publication. How do
you know when the time has come? There is an optimal time at which to
submit your work for publication—the time where the marginal cost of
polishing starts exceeding the marginal benefit of doing so—and that time
depends on a variety of factors related to the work itself, where you are in
your career, when in the academic year you submit, how many other people
might be working on similar ideas, and where you want to submit.
The work itself. You should submit your work when it is ready. When is
that? One thing I was told in graduate school was that your paper is ready to
be submitted for publication when you keep hearing the same comments
about it when presenting it, or in conversations with colleagues about it.
That advice, however, is somewhat incomplete. For instance, you may have
a paper whose way of measuring the outcome of interest is deeply flawed,
which means you are likely to hear over and over when presenting that your
outcome of interest is not measured well. If there exists a way to fix that
problem, this does not mean that your paper is ready to be submitted! So
perhaps a more useful statement is:
Your paper is ready to be submitted for publication when you
keep hearing the same comments about it when presenting, or in
conversations with colleagues about it, and those comments are
about things you cannot do anything about except acknowledge
them in the paper.

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If you have a chance to present your work widely, at a number of
seminars and conferences, you should do so. It is very helpful to take a
paper on the road for a while before submitting it for publication, both
because this means you may receive comments that will help make your
work better, and because this means your would-be reviewers may have had
a chance to see it—and ask their questions about it.
Where you are in your career. The earlier it is before a big deadline
where your publications will matter (in the US, there are three such times,
typically: when you go on the job market, when you go up for tenure, and
when you go up for promotion), the more you can afford to wait and perfect
the work. One important thing to bear in mind when considering how long
to wait before submitting is that the time between submission and
acceptance can take anywhere between one and five years, depending on
where you are submitting. The best-case scenario is one where the first
decision on your paper is conditionally accepted or accepted with minor
revisions after a first round of review, and where the review process is quick
(i.e., fewer than three months elapse between the moment you submit and
the moment you get a decision on your submission).
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Generally, however, if
your department has its PhD students write a second- or third-year
qualifying research paper, you should submit it for publication with the
hope of having a publication before going on the job market. Likewise, you
should aim to have your job-market paper submitted before you start
teaching when starting in a tenure-track position—if anything follows
Parkinson’s Law (“Work expands to fill the time available for its
completion”), it is teaching.
When you choose to submit in the academic year. One thing many
researchers are unaware of is that journal submissions are not uniformly
distributed throughout the year. Most academic economists tend to “finish”
articles in the few weeks after classes end (between late April and early
June in the US), in the few days before their semester starts (between mid-
August and mid-September in the US), and over the winter holidays
(between mid-December and mid-January in the US). But those are also the
times when editors and reviewers are most likely to be on vacation or taking
time off to be with family (at least in late summer–early fall and over the
winter holidays), which may lead you to conclude that the review process is
slower than it actually is.

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Where you submit. Although where you should submit your work is the
topic of the next section, where you submit will affect when you should
submit. Typically, the higher-ranked the journal you are aiming for within
economics, the longer a successful process will take. As a senior colleague
put it to me when I started on the tenure track, “getting a paper published in
a top-five journal is a five-year process.” General-science journals like
Nature, PNAS, or Science tend to have a very short review process (i.e., at
most two months on average) relative to economics journals. There are also
journals (such as Economic Inquiry) that offer the opportunity to submit
under an “up or out” system, where the first decision will either be an
acceptance (perhaps with minor revisions) or a rejection. Bear in mind,
however, that journals that have a fast-track, up-or-out submission track in
no way lower their quality threshold for papers submitted on that fast track.