Doing Economics

4.10 Whether and How to Appeal an Editorial
Decision
When you receive a rejection which you believe is unjustified, you can
always appeal the editor’s decision. Some journals have a formal appeal
process in place,
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whereas others tend to deal with appeals on a case-by-
case basis.
Just because you can always appeal an editor’s decision, however, does
not mean you should.
First, if you wish to appeal an editorial decision, make sure that you have
as good a case as you can possibly have for doing so. If your paper was
rejected on the basis of its fit with the journal’s aims and scope, there is no
use in telling the editor that you disagree with her interpretation of those
aims and scope and that you think your paper is a good fit for the journal. If
that is the basis for your appeal, you are likely to be told—deservedly so—
that you are entirely free to reinterpret the journal’s aims and scope when
you are chosen to be editor of that journal.
A good case for an appeal is one where one of the editor’s stated reasons
for rejecting your paper is grounded in a clear mistake that the editor (and
possibly the reviewer who brought up that reason to the editor) made about
your manuscript. For instance, a colleague once told me about the following
successful appeal. That colleague and his coauthors had run an RCT to test
the impact of some intervention and submitted it for publication to a
journal. This was in the mid-2000s, when RCTs were not as widespread
(and their mechanics and properties not as well known) as they are now.
The authors had randomly assigned observations to treatment, but treatment
take-up was voluntary, so that it was not possible to recover an average
treatment effect, but only an estimate of the intention to treat (ITT). To
make things worse, the authors had been somewhat unclear about that.
When the reviewer brought up the fact that even though treatment
assignment was experimental, treatment take-up was endogenous, the editor
read no further, and rejected on the vague basis of endogeneity of the
authors’ results. The authors decided to appeal, arguing that even though
their research design only allowed the identification of an ITT instead of an
average treatment effect (ATE), their findings were of interest nonetheless,

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if only because theirs was the first experimental study in that literature.
Ultimately, the editor agreed with the appeal, and the paper was published.
Where things get murkier, and where you have much less of a case for an
appeal, are those cases where the editor or the reviewers misunderstood
something in your paper. Here, even though you could appeal and explain
to the editor the mistake they or the reviewers made in understanding your
work, you are likely to be told that the onus of being understood is entirely
on you, and that you had one shot at it. In other words, there is an unspoken
rule here that peer review is not a proofreading service, that you should
submit a manuscript that clearly explains what it does and why it does it,
and that if anything is unclear, that is as good a reason as any to reject your
manuscript. This may seem unfair to you (doubly so if English is not your
first language; see chapter 7), but forewarned is forearmed.
You should clearly avoid appealing when you feel as though the
reviewers were positive about your work, but the editor chose to reject
nonetheless. This is so for two reasons. First, because you have only read
the reviews, and not the reviewers’ confidential comments to the editor,
which are often much more candid and straightforward than the reviews
themselves—believe it or not, many reviewers try to write their reviews so
that their comments are kind and constructive. Thus, no matter what you
(think you can) infer from a review, you are only getting part of the story.
Second, because editors have their own preferences, too. They may not
have been crazy about your paper, but in their humility, they nevertheless
chose to send it out for review to see whether actual experts on your topic
would like it. In that case, reviews that were mildly positive but not overly
excited about your work might have been enough to confirm their initial
suspicions, and cause them to reject.
Generally speaking, I would encourage you to avoid appealing editorial
decisions, even in those cases where you feel like you might have a good
basis for an appeal. First, and as I alluded to above, editors may not always
give you the whole story behind a rejection. Second, you especially do not
want to acquire a reputation for being the kind of person who appeals
editorial decisions. The economics profession is composed of a relatively
small number of people who interact repeatedly, and while positive
information about specific individuals tends to travel through networks
slowly (if at all), negative information tends to travels fast. This is even

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more so within specific fields of economics, or within groups of researchers
working on the same topic within a field.
Rejection stinks, but it is best to err on the side of assuming that the
editor had a good reason to reject your work, whether they communicated it
clearly to you or not, and move on to your next target journal.