Doing Economics

4.4 What to Prepare Before Submitting
Having chosen where to submit and having prepared your manuscript in
view of submitting it there, what else do you need to prepare before
submitting? Unfortunately, there are as about as many precise answers to
that question as there are journals in existence, and even journals in the
same discipline that fall under the same publisher may request different
things from prospective authors. What follows is a nonexhaustive list of all
the things you may be requested to submit, and what they typically entail,
beyond the paper itself and its various appendices.
Cover Letter. Not all journals require a cover letter. Some journals will
have a box in which you can write specific comments to the editor if they
are required or if you have them, and where you can direct the editor’s

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attention to the important stuff (e.g., “The data we use is proprietary, and
we cannot share it beyond descriptive statistics”). Generally, however,
cover letters for economics journals are best kept short: “Dear colleagues, I
am delighted to submit our paper titled [title] for publication in [journal].
My coauthors and I wish to confirm that this paper is not concurrently being
submitted anywhere else, and that it consists entirely of original work.
Sincerely, [Author].” A cover letter is not the place for you to restate your
paper’s findings, to explain why it is important, or to note that it has already
received media coverage. At most, you can note some specific things you
want the managing editor to know about (e.g., “This is a resubmitted
version of a paper which [editor] had previously rejected, but which she
said she wanted to see a thoroughly revised version of under a reject-and-
resubmit”), but nothing more.
Title Page. Many journals—those that retain a double-blind reviewing
policy
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—will ask for a separate title page. This should include your paper’s
title, the names and affiliations of the authors, the abstract, as well as an
acknowledgments footnote where you thank your sources of funding, and
colleagues who have actually taken the time to read your paper and
comment on it,
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Manuscript. This is self-explanatory. Whether you should include the
title page or leave it out altogether will be specified on the journal website.
A useful tip: in cases where you are asked to submit your manuscript
without the title page, include the title and abstract on the first page of your
manuscript, just before the introduction begins. This is because you want to
make sure the reviewers actually see your abstract. If your abstract only
shows up on the title page and the journal has a double-blind policy, you
run the risk that the reviewers will not know what to expect going into your
paper. As discussed in chapter 2, managing the editor’s and the reviewers’
expectations is key in getting your work published. One more thing I would
encourage you to do: if you have appendix materials, include them here, in
the same document as the manuscript, even if the journal’s editorial system
has a separate slot to upload your appendices as well. I have seen cases
where appendices were not sent to reviewers, and where the reviewers got
annoyed about that fact and did not think of asking the editor whether those
materials were available, and recommended a rejection. It is much better for

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you that the reviewers get your appendix twice than they do not get it at all.
The same goes for pre-analysis plans and other ancillary materials.
Appendices. Anything you want your reviewers to see but which you do
not feel is directly of interest to the more general reader should go in here.
Do not feel like (or worse, state that) anything should be left out “in the
interest of brevity,” or “omitted but available from the authors.” Your
appendix is where you can stretch your wings and show all of the work you
can show in making your case for your results. As far as etiquette goes, do
not include output from the software you use, both because those can be
difficult to read—your reviewers will not have the patience to figure out
what var3 refers to, or they may simply not be familiar with the specific
software you are using—and because it is simple courtesy to provide the
reviewers with tables that are easy to interpret. But you can include
experimental protocols, pre-analysis plans, and so on here.
Disclosures. Thanks in part to the Great Recession, which highlighted
that some economists making policy recommendations also had major
conflicts of interest (Berrett 2012), many leading journals—certainly all of
the of the AEA journals—now require that authors fill out a disclosure form
before their paper can be sent out for review. Because some of the findings
published in economics journals directly influence policy, the aim of
requiring these disclosures is simply to reduce the likelihood of conflicts of
interest. If you do not have any conflict of interest, you still need to fill out
a disclosure form, but doing so is relatively simple. If you do have a
conflict of interest, fill the disclosure form truthfully to avoid problems
down the road.
Code and Data. After emphasizing the internal validity of economic
findings, the Credibility Revolution of the early 2000s (Angrist and Pischke
2010) has more recently led to an emphasis on transparency and
replicability in the interest of credibility (Christensen and Miguel 2018).
Some journals now require that you turn in your code and data when
submitting an empirical article for publication, and we can reasonably
expect that more and more journals will require that you do so. Entire
guides have been written about how to properly prepare replication files
(among the earliest such guides, see King 1995), and the AEA has
resources on its website regarding how to prepare replication materials
(American Economic Association 2020). Another useful resource is the

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entire portion of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (better
known as 3ie) website dedicated to replication (International Initiative for
Impact Evaluation 2020). Ideally, you should include what is necessary for
a reader to conduct a “push-button” replication of your paper. That is, to run
your code with your data and reproduce each table and figure in your paper
and its appendix in order.
Highlights. Some journals require authors to also submit highlights of
their article. Those are a series of three to five bullet points that explain
what your article does, with each bullet kept short.
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A good list of
highlights mentions at least three things: (i) what the research question is,
(ii) how it is answered (i.e., using which data and method), and (iii) what
the core finding is. After spending years working on an article by refining
its arguments and polishing the empirical work it contains, it can be very
frustrating to have to boil down your paper to a list of bullet points,
especially since those highlights are only ever prepared by authors when
they have to, namely when submitting. As such, it may be tempting to cut
corners. Resist that temptation and approach these highlights thoughtfully,
both because some busy readers (e.g., journalists looking for new research
findings to write about, other researchers conducting a review of the
literature) might only look at your highlights, and because those highlights
are used by search engines to link to your article in response to certain
keyword searches.
Other Materials. It is impossible for a list such as this one to cover all the
possible idiosyncratic things some journals will require. The more you stray
from economics (i.e., general and field) journals to go toward policy
journals, interdisciplinary journals, and journals outside of economics,
however, the more likely you are to be asked for things not covered in this
list. For instance, I was once asked for a tweet-length summary of one of
my papers for a journal’s social media account, and many journals now
encourage authors to submit a graphical abstract—a figure summarizing the
paper—if possible.