Doing Economics

4.3.1 Economics Journals versus Other Journals
The first question you should ask yourself is whether you should submit to
an economics journal (e.g., the American Economic Review, Econometrica,
the Journal of Public Economics), an interdisciplinary journal (e.g., World
Development, Global Environmental Change, Health Services Research), or
a general scientific journal (e.g., Nature, PNAS, Science).
Ideally, you should choose the broad category of journal—economics,
interdisciplinary, or general scientific—you want to submit to before you
start writing your manuscript, because these different categories aim to
appeal to different readerships, which means that your article will have to
be written differently for these different readerships. Chapter 2 explained
how to do so.
Which of these three broad categories to submit to will depend on your
paper itself, on your preferences and what you value, as well as on factors
external to you. In terms of preferences, what kind of scholar do you want
to be? Do you aim to speak to a smaller group of people who are highly
respected experts in your field or in economics? Then go for an economics
journal. Do you aim to speak to a broader audience of social scientists who
work on a set of related policy issues (e.g., climate change, health care,
international development)? Then go for an interdisciplinary journal. Or do
you aim to speak to the broadest possible audience—social scientists and
natural scientists—working on those policy issues? Then go for a general
scientific journal.
Not every paper has the potential to be submitted to all three categories,
no matter how much rewriting you do. General scientific journals will tend
to want clear connections to questions of broad scientific interest, and they
tend to value linkages to scientific debates and external validity much more
than they do internal validity. Thus, a paper that most applied
microeconomists would deem unacceptable (say, a paper that relies rather
mechanically on fixed effects to “deal with endogeneity”) but which uses
satellite data on all cultivated plots in the world to look at soil degradation
has a much better chance of being interesting to Science than the results of
an RCT on water quality in 50 communities in Lesotho.
Relatedly, if you want to maximize the expected number of citations to
your article you should favor, in order, general scientific journals,
interdisciplinary journals, and then economics journals. For all of the cult-

---

like veneration of the top five economics journals within economics, those
journals tend to have low impact factors relative to interdisciplinary
journals and general scientific journals.
6
For instance, in development
economics and policy in 2019, the Journal of Development Economics had
an impact factor of 2.649, but World Development had an impact factor of
4.410, PNAS had an impact factor of 10.620, and Science had an impact
factor of 41.845.
The expected number of citations to your work is a factor that is both
internal to you—you may or may not value citations—as well as external to
you—as I have already mentioned, people from other disciplines (including
those at the college and university levels, who will make recommendations
about whether you should get tenure or be promoted) are familiar with
impact factors, but they are almost surely unfamiliar with the subtle
difference between an article in the Journal of Monetary Economics and the
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.
The other external considerations to keep in mind are what kind of job
you want to go for (if you are submitting as a graduate student), and what
your colleagues and the people in your area of research and in your field
(who will be called upon write your external review letters for promotion
and tenure) value. Graduate students should probably stick to economics
journals, since those are the journals they are trained to read articles in (and,
in some cases, write for). If you already have a job but do not have tenure,
then your goal is to please your colleagues and your letter writers. If you are
in an economics department, this very likely means that you should submit
to economics journals. If you are in a multidisciplinary outfit (e.g., a
business or policy school), then do your best to find out what your
colleagues value and what kind of scholar they are likely to solicit external
review letters from, and adjust your strategy based on the preferences of
those two non-overlapping sets of scholars.
7
 Finally, if you have yet to go
up for promotion to full professor, you are generally free to choose your
path, which can be anything from doing more of the same things that got
you tenure in the first place to aiming for more interdisciplinary or general
scientific scholarship, and even to writing books.
One unspoken rule you should know about when submitting to journals
within economics is this: economists prize efficiency, which means that
beyond enforcing page limits, instead of having authors waste their time

---

formatting their manuscripts to some arbitrary (and often borderline
unreasonable) specifications, journals are willing to wait until a journal is
conditionally accepted before having the authors go through the rigmarole
of properly formatting their article to the journal’s specifications. If you are
just starting out, this is good to know, because time is of the essence, and
you are unlikely to have an afternoon to waste on properly formatting your
article. The rule of thumb is that if your paper looks like a working paper as
laid out in chapter 2 and you do not go beyond the journal’s page limit for
submitted articles, you are unlikely to be told to go format your paper per
the journal’s specifications before it gets sent out for review.
With that said, one of the anonymous reviewers who reviewed the
proposal for this book noted that they had recently spoken with a professor
at a top-five department who had told them that in practice, the appearance
and aesthetics of a paper are often influential in determining which papers
get read, which candidates are invited to interview, which submissions get
past the desk rejection threshold, and so on. There are best practices for
making figures, tables, and slides. You may think of these things as minor
details. That is entirely your prerogative, but if this is even remotely true, it
is well worth working hard to ensure that the look of your paper conforms
to what you see in working papers by the best and the brightest.