Doing Economics

Economic Growth, and the Journal of Human Resources ask you to list would-be reviewers.
Outside of economics, general science journals like PNAS and Science ask you the same.
13
. Likewise, if you are asked to review a paper whose author you are close to (say, because they
were one of your advisors, or you are coauthors), it is best to let the editor know that you have a

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conflict of interest, and let them decide for themselves whether they are okay with it.
14
. Technically speaking, there probably is a way to keep track of how often you log on to an
editorial management system, but I have yet to find an editor who had so much time on their
hands (or cared enough) to keep track of that.
15
. At the American Economic Review, for instance, it is not uncommon for authors to receive five
reviews.
16
. You may think you are unlikely to get caught, and that if you do, it will not matter. In my
experience, authors tend to view editors much like undergraduate students view their professors.
That is, as entities that are entirely independent from one another. But just as professors tend to
know each other and will sometimes talk to each other about specific students, editors tend to
know each other and will sometimes talk to each other about authors. As for thinking that it will
not matter if you do get caught, because you can just coast on the high quality of your work, that
is a risky gamble. Though there certainly are a number of successful toxic people in economics,
those people are successful in spite of their being toxic, and they almost always fail to realize that
they could be even more successful if not for their toxicity.
17
. If you never face rejection, it is either because you submit everything to journals whose quality
standards are too low or to predatory journals. In either case, you owe it to yourself to be more
ambitious.
18
. This is because most early-career researchers start out ambitiously, by submitting their first few
papers to journals that are significantly higher-ranked than the journals that will eventually accept
those papers. Most researchers eventually develop a good instinct about where a given paper will
eventually get published, but that instinct is a byproduct of experience.
19
. At the journal I am currently editing, for instance, appeals are handled by a different editor than
the one who handled the original submission, and the appeal editor usually looks at the entire
correspondence folder (manuscript, reviews, decision letter, appeal, and any other relevant
documents) before making a decision, which sometimes might involve soliciting advice from
additional reviewers.
20
. If that process was good enough for French mathematician and polymath Henri Poincaré, it
should be good enough for most of us. In an article on creativity in science and art, Holton (2001)
writes: “Poincaré analyzed [his] intuitions in these terms: ‘Most striking at first is this appearance
of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this
unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable . . . It seems, in such
cases, that one is present at one’s own unconscious work, made particularly perceptible to the
overexcited consciousness.’”
21
. For example, when I finally got an R&R on my job-market paper after six years of submitting
and getting rejected, the statistical test I was running to investigate my research question rested
pretty heavily on the theoretical model I had developed to guide the empirical work, and the test
clearly involved regressing the outcome variable on the slope of a function of an observable
variable rather than on the variable itself (Bellemare 2012). When a reviewer asked me to cut out
the theoretical model (and the editor agreed with that reviewer), my first inclination as a pre-
tenure academic was to do everything the reviewers asked for. But when I realized that taking out
the theoretical framework would remove any sound basis for my empirical test, the compromise I
settled upon was to put the theoretical framework in an appendix.
22
. Related to this point, you will sometimes receive comments from friends and colleagues on your
paper after you have received an R&R on it. Very often, it might be tempting to implement some
of the changes those comments suggest you should make. Resist that temptation! I see a revise-
and-resubmit as a near-binding contract wherein the editor tells you that she is likely to accept
your manuscript if you do everything she and the reviewers ask for—no more, no less.

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23
. Some editors refuse to accept a paper until all reviewers are completely satisfied with everything,
going up to five rounds of revision. Such an editor can be the bane of the existence of someone on
the tenure track, for whom time is of the essence, because drawing that editor will often mean a
manuscript will be with a journal for three years or more before it is finally accepted. But editor
types vary. I know what I like in a paper, so my own preference, if at all possible, is to make the
authors suffer no more than one round of (substantial) revisions unless there is something
fundamentally wrong with a revision, and to treat reviewers as working for the journal instead of
the other way around. If time is of the essence for you, discreetly asking around whether a given
editor is the kind to entertain several rounds of revision can save you some precious time.
24
. The query is fictitious, but the example used for it is not: Stiglitz really did publish articles in
four of the top five journals in a single year.
25
. That said, scholarly impact concerns focusing on citations should probably only drive your
choice of topics and research questions after getting tenure. Because citation numbers are
extremely noisy for people who are only five to seven years post-PhD, citation counts are rarely
all that relevant to tenure decisions, and what matters at that stage is a sufficient number of
articles (e.g., at least five articles) in journals whose quality is above a certain threshold (e.g., top
field journals or better), as well as other potentially nonlinear adjustments (e.g., at least one top-
five). I would thus encourage you to focus on an article’s expected impact—citations or otherwise
—for those articles which you expect to be counting for what lies beyond tenure.
26
. It may pay off to know the publisher’s policy on pre-prints before submitting. In a sad cautionary
tale about working papers, Dionne (2011) tells the story of how she had an acceptance at a top
public health journal rescinded after the publisher discovered that her paper had been posted in a
working paper series.

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