Doing Economics

6.6 Editing Journals
Another bit of service that you may be asked to perform if you do well
enough in your field is editorial service—the service task whereby one gets
to handle manuscripts by coordinating the review process for those
manuscripts.
As I have alluded to earlier, various journals use different terms to refer
to the same tasks, so for the sake of clarity, I will be talking of two different
editorial tiers:
• Editor: Whether the journal has one or more of those, the editor is
the person who is ultimately in charge of the scholarly aspects of
the journal. Typically, editors handle manuscripts, and they decide
on the journal’s aims and scope as well as on who gets to serve as
associate editor.
• Associate Editor: A journal will typically have a number of those.
An associate editor may or may not handle manuscripts, and
when they do handle manuscripts, they may simply be in charge
of getting reviews, with the final decision left to the editor.

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The type of service I am talking about here is the kind where you are
assigned a manuscript to handle—that is, to solicit reviews on, and usually
make a final decision about whether it should be desk rejected, or sent out
for review and then rejected, given a chance at being revised and
resubmitted, or accepted. Getting asked to perform that kind of service is
one of the highest honors your field or the profession can bestow upon you,
because it signals that your peers view you as being both competent enough
and as having good taste and that as such, they trust you to shape the
direction the field is taking over the next few years.
How do you get asked to do editorial work? Though who you know and
who is in your social network is obviously important,
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it is no less
important to have published well (i.e., if you want to be editor of a given
journal, it helps to have published consistently at least at the level of that
journal), to have been a good reviewer (i.e., to submit reviews that are both
on point and on time), and to have a reputation for being organized.
When you do get asked, should you take on editorial service? Although
the answer will depend on a variety of circumstances and on your other
commitments, here are a few things which really make a difference in how
onerous editorial responsibilities will be for you:
1. Do you enjoy refereeing? Most principal–agent models assume
that the agent’s cost-of-effort function is increasing and convex
(Bolton and Dewatripont 2005). Be that as it may, just how
convex that function is differs across individuals. Some people
find refereeing enjoyable and look forward to taking the time to
read a paper and write up their comments on it. Others find
refereeing to be more of a chore than anything else, or a tax they
have to pay in order to remain in their field’s good graces. If you
fall in the latter category, I strongly encourage you not to
undertake any editorial work. We all know people who wanted to
do a PhD because they cared more about putting “Doctor” in front
of or “PhD” after their name than they did about taking a deep
dive into a given topic and generating new knowledge about that
same topic; more often than not, those people ended up struggling
to complete their PhD, if they completed it at all. So if the only
reason you want to do editorial work is because of the prestige it

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brings, you will be entirely unhappy as an editor, you are unlikely
to be good at it, and you should spend your time more
productively.
2. How much administrative support will you be getting? Some
journals have an editorial assistant, who takes care of making sure
submissions are properly formatted and of dispatching
submissions to handling editors. At other journals, there is no
such support, and an editor or co-editor has to do that job. At yet
other journals, the editor has to proofread all articles before
sending them on to the publisher’s production department. Given
that heterogeneity of administrative costs associated with editing
a journal, it is worth asking what kind of administrative support
you will be getting if you say yes, both from the publisher and
from your institution.
3. How good is your social network? Would-be reviewers are more
likely to respond quickly and favorably to a refereeing request if
it comes from someone they have heard of, and they are
significantly more likely to do the same if it comes from someone
they know personally. Likewise, you are a lot more likely to be
able to exert the necessary social pressure to get a reviewer to
submit their review in a timely manner if the two of you know
each other—virtually all of my disaster stories when it comes to
reviewers comes from cases where I had never met the reviewer
in person or, at the very least, interacted with them over email or
social media. I have seen how the quality of one’s social network
maps directly into how effective they are as an editor often
enough. If you rarely go to conferences or are not at all involved
in social media in a professional manner (more on this in the next
section), you may have a hard time connecting with would-be
reviewers, and a lack of engagement with your field or with the
profession is likely to be a liability.
4. Does it pay? Most journals pay their editors for their time, but it
is very rare that the pay comes close to being a significant
fraction of one’s overall annual income, or reflects accurately
how much time one spends on editing. Still, some form of

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monetary compensation definitely helps, and it is worth knowing
how much you will be compensated for your time.
5. Are you organized? The most efficient editors, those who are
best-positioned to make decisions on manuscripts in a reasonable
time (i.e., significantly less than four months, and in under three
months if possible), are people who spend a lot of time at their
computer doing work, and often people who always have a
browser tab open for their journal’s editorial system. If you are
someone who has an uneasy relationship with email, or who
insists on not looking at their computer in the evening, on
weekends, or during the holidays, editing a journal may not be for
you. Make no mistake: there is nothing wrong with prioritizing
leisure time or prioritizing work–life balance if that is what you
care about, but the task of editing a journal necessarily involves
prioritizing work over leisure—at least if you hope to maintain
some research productivity while you serve as editor.
To close this section, here are a number of observations about serving as
editor.
First off, it can be hard to find reviewers. For every article I want to send
out for review, I need at least two reviewers, ideally three. When reviewers
disagree, unless I am an expert on the topic of the paper, I often have to ask
for the help of an additional reviewer or associate editor. To get two
reviewers, I have to ask about three people on average.
Second, it can be hard to find competent reviewers. Once I have found
my two or three reviewers, it is not unlikely that one of them will send me a
review that is not very useful—a short review offering very little in the way
of comments the authors can use to improve their manuscript.
Third, I have already mentioned the “never touch a piece of paper twice”
rule in a footnote in section 6.3, and it applies here as well: once you start
looking at a manuscript or writing a decision letter, finish the task before
moving on. It is really when you look at something, do a bit of work on it,
decide to go do something else and come back to it later that things begin
festering in your inbox and on your to-do list.
Fourth, personalized emails work a lot better. Instead of sending a form
email to the reviewers I think are likely to decline my request to referee, I

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often personalize the email a bit by inserting a personal note before the
automatic email. This has improved my reviewer response rates
significantly, presumably because people realize there is a human being on
the other side (and one whom they know personally).
Similarly, personalized desk rejections work a lot better, too. For that
reason, when I desk reject, I often personalize the email by telling the
authors (i) why I chose to desk reject (often, it is simply a question of fit
with the journal, and not of quality; when it is a matter of quality, I make a
broad comment that may help improve the manuscript substantially) and, as
much as possible, (ii) where to submit next.
Fifth, plagiarism of all kinds is a huge issue. One of the perks of working
with a big publisher is that the publisher can afford nice things. One of
those nice things is access to plagiarism-detecting software, which
constantly scours the worldwide web to find similarities between a fresh
new submission and other documents on the web. Often, those similarities
are between the submission and one of its earlier versions. But in (too)
many cases, the software will uncover instances of plagiarism, whether this
means self-plagiarism (e.g., an author reusing an entire page of a paper he
has previously published and whose copyright resides with another
publisher, with that previous paper not cited), “light” plagiarism (e.g., an
author lifting a few sentences or a paragraph from his employer’s website or
from a document published by his employers, on which he was not one of
the authors), or “hard” plagiarism (e.g., an author submitting an article that
is about 50 percent copied from papers written by others).
Sixth, editing a journal will bring one new source of anxiety to your life,
namely impact factor anxiety, or the anxiety derived from the desire to
maintain or improve the impact factor of the journal you edit. Editing a
journal with a high or rising impact factor is a double-edged sword, because
“Can we keep this up? Can we keep improving?” is the kind of thing that
keeps editors awake at night.
That said, serving as journal editor can be incredibly fulfilling. Over and
above the pay and the prestige that come with serving as associate editor or
editor, it is very rewarding to see good manuscripts come in, go through the
peer-review process, come out better than they came in, and finally be
published in the journal. The whole thing is doubly rewarding when the

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submission comes from a young researcher for whom the publication really
makes a difference at the margin.