Doing Economics

4.6 When to Propose Reviewers and Associated
Conflicts of Interest
Some journals will allow you to suggest the names of a few reviewers
whom you think would do a good job reviewing your paper, and some
journals will even allow you to list the names of scholars whom you would
rather not have as reviewers. This is a practice that is mainly found outside
of economics, but some economics journals have adopted it.
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Here, it is obviously tempting to list friends, advisors, and coauthors in
the “wanted” category, and it is just as tempting to list scholars whose
findings yours go against, or with whom you’ve had personal conflicts in
the “unwanted” category, because you may think that the former will be
especially kind to your paper and the latter will be especially unkind to it.
While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with letting the editor know
who you would rather not have as a reviewer, it is more ethically fraught to
list advisors, friends, and coauthors as would-be reviewers. First off,
ideally, the peer-review system relies on the opinions of peer researchers
who are not invested in your research getting published or in your being
successful one way or the other. Second, the risk with listing people who
are close to your research as peer reviewers is that if the editor finds out
about those close links (and often, people on your “wanted” list will reveal
those links themselves), this gives them an occasion to think that you are

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less than forthcoming about things, including perhaps the validity of your
findings. There is thus an incentive for truth-telling here.
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4.7 Whether and When to Contact the Editor in
Charge
Once you have submitted your paper, the wait for a decision on your
manuscript begins. For all of the talk of how long it takes to hear back from
journals, things are significantly better than 15 years ago. In the old days,
you submitted a paper by mailing it to the editor in charge by postal mail. In
those days, physical manuscripts would sometimes get lost in the mail, or
there would be delays in mail delivery, or worse—that editors or their
assistants would misplace a manuscript, and you would not know about it
until you sent a polite inquiry to the journal six months to a year later, only
to be told that they could not find your manuscript.
Fortunately, everything is done electronically nowadays, which means
that manuscripts rarely (if ever) get lost, and that authors are no longer at
the mercy of postal delays. As a result, the transaction costs associated with
submitting manuscripts for review have gone down significantly, which has
had both good and bad consequences. On the one hand, the process is
significantly more streamlined and efficient, which tends to speed things up.
On the other hand, and as anyone who has read a modicum of New
Institutional Economics knows, lower transaction costs lead to more market
activity at the margin (Williamson 1975). This, combined with the fact that
there are now many more research economists than a mere 20 years ago,
means that on the whole, the peer-review process is not significantly faster
than it was back then, and you can expect to wait on average about three to
six months for a decision on a paper that does not get desk-rejected.
Understandably, you are champing at the bit to hear from the editor about
whether your manuscript has a chance to get published in the journal you
submitted it to. So when should you contact the editor in charge? Should
you ever do so?
Before answering those questions, let us get one thing out of the way:
editors do not keep track of how often you check the status of your

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manuscript on their journal’s editorial system, and doing so will have no
impact on the fate of your manuscript.
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 And there is sometimes valuable
information to be drawn from your manuscript’s status.
Indeed, if your manuscript is “with editor” for more than a month, you
can send a polite email asking the editor about the status of your
manuscript, as that might nudge her to get to make a decision one way or
the other (i.e., desk reject, or send for review) about your manuscript.
Similarly, if your manuscript is “under review” for more than six months,
you can also email the editor asking the same. If a manuscript is “under
review” for a while, then the system says that it is “ready for decision,” but
it then goes back “under review,” it usually means that the reviewers were
split, and the editor is soliciting additional reviews. Or it can mean that one
of the reviewers let the editor down by not submitting a review, and your
manuscript has gone to a new reviewer.
One category of emails I would discourage the readers of this book from
sending consists of what I have come to call “protest” emails. Those emails
are usually sent in response to a rejection or desk rejection, but they are not
formal appeals—they merely consist of the authors protesting the reasons
for the rejection. My attitude to those emails is to file them away without
responding unless the authors specifically request an appeal (more on those
below), since editorial decisions are meant to be final rather than opening
gambits in a negotiation.
Finally, if you do get a favorable decision, you may be tempted to email
the editor back to thank them. That is certainly nice, but it is by no means
necessary.