Doing Economics

4.5 How to Maximize Your Chances of Getting
Good Reviews

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For better or for worse, economists have a reputation in academia for being
particularly unkind to one another and uncaring of one another’s feelings.
Part of that is certainly the byproduct of good intentions: as a profession,
we value stating things as clearly as possible. But part of it comes from a
less well-intended place, as we have all witnessed the back-in-my-day-we-
suffered-through-x-and-it-only-made-us-better attitude of some senior
scholars, according to which because they had to face certain hardships,
others should, too. Also, part of economists’ reputation as being unkind and
uncaring almost surely comes from more toxic traits, though whether that is
the result of selection into the profession or the result of acculturation into it
is anybody’s guess, given the reflection problem (Manski 1993). The end
result, however, is that a lot of the tone used by economists when
commenting on each other’s work can be off-putting to someone outside the
economics profession, to someone new to it, or even to those of us who
have simply grown to accept it as a common (but still discouraging)
practice.
Imagine, then, what happens to that (seemingly) unkind and uncaring
tone when an interaction not only does not take place face to face, but is
also anonymous—and often only anonymous in one direction!
Given the nature of the economics profession as characterized above,
there are two things you can do. The first is to brace yourself for reviews
which at best might willingly (if not willfully) misunderstand the arguments
in your paper, and at worst be insulting and contain personal attacks.
So how can you maximize your chances of getting good reviews, or at
least minimize your chances of getting bad reviews? Having served as
editor at two field journals, I can offer some insight. From what I have seen,
you should generally try to avoid the following situations:
Submitting to a journal that has not published on the topic of your
manuscript in more than five years. One thing you should be aware of is
that once they decide to send your manuscript out for review, most editors
will begin their search for reviewers for your manuscript by looking at your
bibliography.
Specifically, they will look at whether (i) you cite their journal and
related journals, and (ii) you cite articles published recently in those
journals. For instance, if you submit to the Journal of Econometrics in
2020, they will likely look to see whether you cite articles in the Journal of

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Econometrics, but also possibly the Journal of Business & Economics
Statistics, the Econometrics Journal, Quantitative Economics, and so forth,
published between 2015 and 2020. Why? Because this allows the editor to
draw up a list of would-be reviewers by looking at who has recently
published on your topic (and thus remains interested in that topic, and has
not moved on from it) in similar journals (and are thus willing to review for
the journal you are submitting to), or at the very least who has published on
closely related topics, and can thus provide knowledgeable comments on
your paper.
Pain is the best teacher, so it is perhaps more useful to illustrate what
happens when you fail to follow that advice. When I am assigned a
manuscript on a topic which the journal I edit (or related journals) has not
published in five years, I immediately ask myself two things. The first is “Is
this a topic that is no longer at the frontier of research?,” in which case I
take a careful look at how the authors justify revisiting that “old” topic. In
some cases, they have a good story for why they do so in that they bring a
serious innovation to the table. But in many cases they do not, and this
makes me likely to desk-reject the manuscript. The second thing I ask
myself is “Who, among those who have worked on this topic in the past and
have published in this and related journals, is likely to still want to review
manuscripts on this topic?” Though it may be hard for an early-career
researcher who has spent all of their time in the economics profession
working on one topic to believe it, most senior scholars’ research agendas
have had more than one phase, and once they are done with a given topic,
they may not want to see another paper on it ever again. And when they do
agree to review on their “old” topic, they may not be familiar with current
methods.
As an editor, when I receive a manuscript (i) on a topic on which we have
not published in five years or more, (ii) that does not cite our journal or
related journals, or (iii) both, if I choose to send the manuscript out for
review, I then have to draw up a list of would-be reviewers by keyword
search. In other words, I may have to choose reviewers going by your
keywords, or by your article’s Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes,
which means that I then end up with reviewers who are only sort of, kind
of, maybe qualified to review your article. This is exactly who you do not
want as reviewers, because the further away a reviewer is from your topic,
the more likely they are to misunderstand what you are doing, fail to see the

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point, want you to write an entirely different paper than the one you
submitted, or feel like they are wasting their time reading something they
are not a priori interested in—and thus to be negatively inclined toward
your manuscript, and recommend a rejection after writing a review that is
not very useful.
To ensure that you get the right reviewers, then, make sure that you
submit to a journal that has recently published on the topic you are working
on (or that related journals have), and make sure that you cite those relevant
articles in those relevant (and related) journals.