Doing Economics

4.3.2 General versus Field Journals
In most cases, you will have chosen to submit to an economics journal, so
the question will be: Should you submit to a general journal (e.g., the
American Economic Review) or to a field journal (e.g., the Journal of
Health Economics)? Again, the decision will depend on several factors.
First off, how much time do you have ahead of you? If you have just
started in a tenure-track job and you have anywhere from four to six years
before you have to apply for tenure, you have enough time to submit to one,
maybe two, maybe even three general economics journals before submitting
to a field journal where your paper is considerably more likely to be
accepted. But please do not let my use of “considerably more likely” fool
you: the acceptance rate at top general economics journals was between 2.5
and 5 percent in 2017, down from between 12 and 24 percent in 1980 (Card
and Della Vigna 2018). In a recent Twitter thread, American Economic

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Journal: Applied Economics editor David Deming reported that his
acceptance rate since he had started as co-editor had been 4 percent. Field
journals are better in relative but not necessarily absolute terms: in
development economics, one of the fields I am familiar with, the acceptance
rate at the top journal—the Journal of Development Economics—was 6
percent in 2016, 5.3 percent in 2017, and 8.3 percent in 2018. At the
American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the acceptance rate was 10.8
percent in 2019 and 10.2 percent in 2020. All of this to say that even in the
best-case scenario, your paper faces difficult odds, and it is best to gird your
loins for what is a long process—this is not a profession for those who want
instant gratification.
Second, there is the question of what your colleagues (who may or may
not know your field, but who will still be voting on whether you should be
getting tenure or be promoted) and external letter writers (who know your
field very well, and will be weighing in on whether you should be getting
tenured or be promoted from outside your institution) will want to see. The
closer you get to being at a top department, the more your colleagues will
expect you to publish in top-five journals—and probably more than once. In
case you are not told exactly what is expected of you by the time you go up
for tenure or promotion, the best way to find out what your colleagues will
expect is to ask your department chair and your senior colleagues. Only in
some rare cases will you get a clear answer, because fuzzy incentives (“You
need to publish well enough”) tend to foster higher effort than bright-line
(“You need at least one article in a top-five journal and four or five more
articles in top field journals”) incentives.
Third, is your paper of sufficiently general interest? It can be particularly
difficult to answer that question if you are an early-career researcher. After
all, you would probably not have spent all that time on your paper if you
did not think it was of general enough interest. And yet, to paraphrase
scriptures, it is almost easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle
than it is for a paper to make successfully through peer-review at top
general journals. Recall what I mentioned about acceptance rates at those
journals a few paragraphs earlier; that, combined with the fact that good
referees are hard to find and thus over-committed, means that editors will
typically be looking for a reason to desk-reject your manuscript, and “not
general enough” is often it.

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I do not yet have a top-five publication, but what I have reliably been told
by a close colleague who has a friend who is editor of a top journal is that
the following rule is used by some editors at top general journals to
determine whether a paper is of general enough interest. When they receive
a paper, those editors look at the list of references. If there are too many
references to field journals, they desk-reject, telling the author their paper is
not of general enough interest, and to send it to a field journal. This is
second-hand information, so I cannot be sure that it is true, but looking at
lists of references for the papers published in top journals on topics I am
familiar with, I have no trouble believing that this rule of thumb for
knowing whether a paper is of general enough interest is widespread among
the editors of top general journals. And though you may think that this is
not a good way to determine what counts as general interest or not, an
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
One unspoken fact of life in the economics profession is that if you want
to publish in top journals, it significantly helps to be “in the club,” meaning
that it helps to have attended a top PhD program, to have been invited to be
a member of the NBER, to be on first-name basis with the movers and
shakers at the very top of your field—that is, those economists at top-20
departments who actively publish in your field—and to have presented your
work to them at the right conferences.
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As I mentioned in the previous
chapter, it really helps if your reviewers have seen you present your paper at
a conference or seminar, because that will have given them a chance to ask
their questions, and they will therefore trust your results more.