JEEA 原执行主编谈经济学发表【转】

* 期刊的一般兴趣？直接拒稿、Cover letters、致谢、年青作者、应对评审人、复制等各类有关经济学发表相关话题

————

Ask the Editor with Juuso Välimäki

The Journal of the European Economic Association is pleased to present a Q&A interview with Juuso Välimäki, Managing Editor of JEEA from 2015-2018.

Answering crowdsourced questions about publishing in economics, Juuso draws on his experience at JEEA to give advice to prospective authors and shed light on the submission process in JEEA for early-career academics.

Juuso is a microeconomic theorist currently serving as Head of Department at the Department of Economics at Aalto University and a Visiting Professor of Economics at Yale University. He has published research in leading economics journals including Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of the European Economic Association, and Journal of Economic Theory. 

You can read the full interview with Juuso below.

General Questions:

1. How do you assess whether a paper is of general interest?

JV: I am an economic theorist by training so my thinking on this issue reflects that background. A successful paper should have an impact on the way the profession views its subject matter. This is quite an easy task if the paper is the first written on a particular topic, and in this case the assessment is more on the generality and external validity of the findings. A paper on a well-explored topic should make us reconsider either the forces behind a result or the empirical support for the results. I should emphasize that overturning existing views is by no means the only way of achieving this. Finding corroborating evidence for existing hypothesis from new datasets and new empirical methods is also valuable.

For methodological contributions, I try to assess the size of the analytical and conceptual advancement on previous work. For example, relaxing an assumption in an existing theory can be of general interest if the author can make a convincing argument for an increased scope of applications. Similarly, if the relaxed assumption results in a new and better understanding of the economic forces behind a result, I consider the paper to be potentially of general interest. Without these ingredients, the manuscript is likely to be of interest to a specialist audience only, and hence not appropriate for JEEA.

For applied theory and experimental work, I evaluate how well the proposed model or the experiment fits the applications that motivate the paper. The paper should perform better than other plausible explanations that can be given for the results. For applied theory, it would be useful to have predictions from the alternative models and a discussion of empirical evidence in favor of the model proposed by the authors. For experimental work, this probably involves additional treatments. Finally, an ideal paper would contain an idea that can be exported to other settings as well. 

2. Why are some papers desk rejected? What determines which papers get full refereeing?

JV: There are quite a few different reasons for desk rejections. The volume of submissions makes it important for the editors to try to economize on editorial resources, in particular on referee effort. If a manuscript does not look like a good fit with the journal, the editor can anticipate the eventual editorial decision, and in such cases, a faster decision is in the interest of all parties. After reading the paper, the editor may for example see that the theoretical novelty is not sufficient for the JEEA or alternatively that the paper lacks sufficient statistical power for solid empirical results.

I would not view a desk rejection implying that the submission is of low quality. In my own decision making, I can assess the relevance of a contribution with much greater confidence if the paper falls into my own expertise. In such cases, I may desk reject the paper even though I consider it a good candidate for the very best theory journals.

3. What do you really want to read in the cover letter of a paper submission?

JV: When submitting my own papers, I have used the cover letter: “Please consider the attached manuscript YYY for publication in XXX”. For most cases, this is sufficient. If there are special circumstances relating to the data sources or issues of conflict with other simultaneous pieces of work in circulation, these should be explained in the cover letter.

4. Should authors include acknowledgements citing conferences they went to and people who gave valuable input in first submission? Are those persons ruled out to be Referees (for fear of biasedness), or even more likely to be?

JV: If a paper has benefited significantly from the comments of another researcher or from comments in a session at a conference, it is polite and appropriate to acknowledge these. I suspect that sometimes authors add or leave out names from the acknowledgements based on strategic considerations. I would not select the entire set of referees from individuals covered in the acknowledgements, but I also take into account the fact that researchers that have seen the paper presented often have a more accurate prior on its significance than a random referee from the same area.

5. I am writing a paper that applies decision-theoretic framework under risk to the context of trade: how much an entrepreneur should optimally invest to promote export under exchange rate volatility and independent background risks. Can I submit it to JEEA?

JV: Since I have not seen the paper, I cannot give a precise assessment of the fit of your paper to JEEA, but I can give a slightly more general answer. Based on your brief description of the topic and methodology of your paper, I would quite likely consider it appropriate for the journal. As a general audience journal, JEEA is particularly interested in the interplay of economic theory (or applied theory) and empirical applications. Over the last decades, international trade has been very successful in coming up with important policy-relevant questions and new models to address them.

6. JEEA does not often accept comment papers. It doesn’t state its policy on replication clearly. What can/will JEEA do to promote the publication of replication articles?

JV: The journal does not have a section dedicated to comments. This implies in principle that any comment published in the journal should pass the same publication threshold as accepted original articles. In practice this means that a successful comment should be on a paper that has had some impact, and the comment should cause a significant re-evaluation of the results or the methods in the original paper. I will come back to the issue of replication in the next few questions.

Junior Scholars:

7. New vs. experienced/renowned researchers: does it matter to the editor?

JV: I do not have any explicit rules in mind when dealing with authors at different career stages. It is easier for me to accept the role in teaching the author how to write when the author is relatively young. Renowned/established authors should already know how to motivate their papers and how to pick the right results and conclusions to highlight.

I also recognize that authors with different backgrounds have had access to very different amounts of senior input when writing their papers. These factors do not change the location of the threshold for acceptance, but my patience in trying to reach that threshold eventually.

8. What advice do you have for grad students or early researchers submitting their first paper? What are common mistakes they make? How should they choose when in the life of the paper to submit first, and to which journal?

JV: These are excellent questions, but unfortunately not easy to answer. One of the key requirements for a successful article is that it should be very clear about its main message. Very often, I get back referee reports (or cover letters) lamenting that it is not clear what we learn from the paper. The authors should make sure that the main research question as well as the main results are communicated as clearly as possible. To achieve this, the authors should present the paper in seminars and also have it read by supervisors and by peers. Before submitting, the author should check that the main message is in fact delivered as intended.

Graduate students should trust their advisor in most cases. The advisor is more experienced and has a better judgment on when a paper is ready. They will also have a good sense of the appropriate journal and it is hard for me to see any reason why the incentives of the student and the advisor should not be aligned on this issue.

Regarding the timing of first submissions, it is easy to err in both directions. It is never a good idea to submit papers just to get comments from referees. The paper should be polished and the author should believe that the relevant issues of robustness etc. have been addressed. At the same time, authors should remember that papers could always be extended and some aspects could conceivably be improved and the process of revisions should converge at some point.

Papers should be submitted to the journals where the author (and her/his advisor) thinks it fits the best. I do not think that submitting first to the very best journals is a good bet unless there is a genuine belief that the paper belongs there. The sense for the right outlet develops over time, and early on, it is a good idea to be open to external advice on this.

9. What should you do when you try to accommodate referees’ suggestions but it changes your result (from statistically significant to statistically insignificant)? How to address this issue, especially if you’re PhD students or junior scholars?

JV: This is now slightly outside my own expertise, but in any case, I believe the author should be completely open about this. In response to the referees, this dependence on the specification should be discussed and of course, the author may try to argue why it is not detrimental to the main findings.

10. Reading through decision letters and reports with junior authors I noticed that many of the authors focus on the least doable of the referees’ comments. As editors, which advice can you give to guide authors towards the key issues?

JV: The author should make the changes that improve the paper. As a result, doable good suggestions should definitely be given the highest priority. 

If some requests are not feasible within a reasonable time, the reasons for this can be explained in the letter to the referees. In principle, the referees should not ask for revisions that cannot be done and the editor should not insist on such changes. Even the conscientious referees do not have as much time to think about the paper as the author and hence they may end up making unreasonable demands. It is fine for the author to try to convince the referee and the editor that what was asked in the report is not possible. I believe that a good explanation for why particular comments cannot be addressed is more valuable than a half-hearted effort that does not quite address the issues raised.

Replication:

11. Given the relevance of the peer review process & replication in science - If a paper gets an R&R, would it be valuable to have a Phd student carefully replicating the results and checking how robusts they are?

JV: I believe some journals (AER?) have adopted such a system. I do not see any harm in doing this. The cost of finding the right students to carry out this is not negligible, for example from which institutions should the students be recruited?

12. Why don't journals hit "do" & ensure tables are recreated from authors' data before publishing? It's concerning when published data doesn't actually recreate the assoc. tables. Do they think it's on the author/that people take the time to check?

JV: I believe this should be part of the publication process and it could be done at various stages of the publication process.

13. Big question: What are the (salient) incentives for editors to demand more replication studies? Are there any?

Elaboration: While we all know that replication is critical for scientific inquiry (and trust in our work), the incentives for junior and mid-career researchers to undertake them are incredibly weak. In 2007 (12 years ago!) Hamermesh wrote "Editors need to take the lead by providing sufficient incentives for top-flight authors of empirical work to engage in pure and scientific replication."

High profile journals do not seem to be willing to take the lead to generate demand for replication. Can I ask Juuso to reflect on editor incentives and why such a fundamental component of the scientific process is not given the weight it deserves? 

JV: My understanding is that the editors’ preferences reflect the preferences of the field more broadly. Hence the lack of incentives for replication studies is an issue for the entire subject area, not just the publication process. As long as the profession values the first paper on a topic significantly more than follow-ups, this is not easy to change. I do believe that the profession would benefit from more systematic replication of its most important papers, though.

As an editor, I try to publish papers that have an impact. While I agree that replications confirming existing results do change our posteriors, this change is not necessarily very large. If replication is understood in the narrow sense of repeating the blueprint and confirming the results from an existing study on a different (but largely similar) dataset using register data from another country, this does not reach the innovativeness required for a top publication. Of course, results that indicate possible difficulties with the existing wisdom would also change the posteriors too and would not be difficult to publish in the first place.

In my view, replications should be published for the most part in other forums. The Journal of Applied Econometrics has a section devoted to replication. It will be interesting to see how well articles published in this outlet are received in the profession. I see no reason why an entire journal could not specialize in replications. Perhaps the professional associations and societies should provide a push in this direction.

——END

本文转自：

https://academic.oup.com/jeea/pages/ask_the_editor

相关阅读：