Doing Economics

4
Navigating Peer Review
After writing up your paper and presenting it to diverse audiences at invited
seminars and conferences, the time has come to submit it for publication. In
economics, journal articles—not books, not chapters in edited volumes, not
peer-reviewed abstracts in conference proceedings, and certainly not op-eds
or blog posts, but articles in peer-reviewed journals—are the coin of the
realm. This means that a research economist’s professional reputation
primarily depends on a combination of the quality and the quantity of the
peer-reviewed articles she has published.
But unless you grew up in a family of academics, odds are you are not
familiar with how to navigate the peer-review process before you submit
your first article for publication. This chapter aims to serve as a guide for
the perplexed when it comes to the peer-review process—and it certainly
can be perplexing to deal with such a unique process early on in one’s
career.
4.1 Why the Peer-Review Process?
Before anything else, it is certainly worth asking: Why has much of modern
day academia—or, at the very least, those academic disciplines that aim to
be scientific—settled on the peer-review process? Why does the fate of our
work have to be at the mercy of a handful of peer reviewers who often rely
on the veil of anonymity to make obnoxious remarks? And indeed, every
once in a while, I see discussions on social media of how the peer-review
system is “broken.” But just as often as I see the word “broken” used in the
economics of food systems—one of my areas of research—to mean
“generating outcomes that I do not like,” I suspect that a lot of the claims
that the peer-review system is “broken” are made by well-meaning

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individuals whose work has recently been rejected—perhaps unfairly or
unjustifiably so.
One of Winston Churchill’s famous quips is “democracy is the worst
form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried
from time to time.” And so it is with the peer-review process. It is not a
perfect system. It can take a very long time to hear back from a journal after
submitting. The reviewers may not have read your work very carefully,
even after you gave them every reason to do so. The editor might not have
read their reviews very closely or at all, or she might not have read your
paper very closely. Ultimately, however, peer review has been adopted by
all the scientific disciplines and by all the journals within those disciplines
without any effort at coordination within or across disciplines for one
reason: because however imperfect, peer review works better than the
alternatives.
A simple example can illustrate my point. At a conference in 2012, I took