RE: Journal response times
OK, but I've never had a paper turned around in less than 6 months (and often it has taken up to a year) at any journal except the QJE. Also, you can't divide time to publish by 3 since most of the time there is only 1 revise and resubmit and in my experience more papers are accepted on the first submission than go for two revise and resubmits. Also in my experience (and that of my friends) the top journal s are the worst for turn around. Econometrica kept one paper of mine for 14 months. A friend had a paper go three rounds at AER and that took 3 years. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of bad papers get rejected quickly and that would bring down the average turn around time a lot. But that is irrelevant if you are submitting a good paper that is eventually going to be published. Then you care about the time to publish and its disgraceful at nearly all economics journals. - - Bill Dickens William T. Dickens The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 797-6113 FAX: (202) 797-6181 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AOL IM: wtdickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/15/02 12:00AM My original statement was not about about time to publication, but turn around time - ie, the time it takes to return a manuscript to author with referee comments. I opined that turn around time for well staffed journals was in the 3-6 month range for the faster social sciences, but much longer for other fields. As another poster noted, if you assume that accepted papers need at least 1 revision, you should multiply that by 3 and then you get the numbers cited in an earlier post - minimum 18 months. This was my estimate for the top journals, which get money for staff. Smaller journals have less money, which translates into a tired editor with grad student assistant, resulting in longer turn around times. Your experience of 14 months for a psych journal is in fact normal, and much better than fields like history, math or literary studies. Perhaps the absolute fastest is experimental physics, where claims of first discovery matter, and stuff is rushed to print in a month or two. Once you work in journal publishing, you soon realize how friggin' hard it is to get stuff reviewed and then 14 months to publication (or even two years) starts to seem reasonable. Fabio I wouldn't if I were you. My submission to Psych Review with a revision took 14 months from submission till it appeared in print. I've never made it into print in a refereed economics journal in less than 18 months and more typical times are 2 to 3 year. Oh yes. And the editor of Psych Review was profusely apologetic for the refereeing taking so long! - - Bill
RE: Journal response times
friend had a paper go three rounds at AER and that took 3 years. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of bad papers get rejected quickly and that would bring down the average turn around time a lot. That is indeed the case. Journals get many papers of low quality, and it's easy to reject the bad ones out of hand. And remember, most papers could be improved, and will go through a round of revision. But that is irrelevant if you are submitting a good paper that is eventually going to be published. Then you care about the time to publish and its disgraceful at nearly all economics journals. - - Bill Dickens William T. Dickens It's not irrelevant at all, and it's not prima facia disgraceful, at least on the part of journals. First, it's not irrelevant because its a signal that your paper is being taken seriously, rather than a curt this is lame. After having seen some lame papers in my day, this happens more than you might think. Second, don't blame journals - blame your colleagues. It is simply impossible to get decent reviews on papers. Take a non-hypothetical example - my recent article in Rationality and Society. This paper is an agent based simulation of an epidemic where agents engage in a very simple signallying game. Now how many of my colleagues could read that paper? Among sociologists, relatively few. Add into the mix that some might lazy, on sabbatical, have family issues, etc. Then it becomes very hard to get reviewers. That happened when I first submitted it to a health journal - nobody they knew was willing to read a technical model. I know one person whose paper was sent to *ten* reviewers. There were promises that the reviews would come in, but they never did. But what can the journal do? I know among sociology journals and some others, turn around times have been cut by doing the following: reject papers if they don't survive the first RR; reject papers based on a single bad review; accept papers one only two decent reviews if they author has a good track record. I know economics journals have setup incentives, but in general it doesn't seem to have worked if the members of this list are to be believed. So let me conclude by observing that the Journal of Artificial Societies and Simulations is the fastest reputable social science journal I know. It's on line, has a cadre of dedicated reviewers and a very smart editor - so you think papers whiz through the review process. Some papers do appear in print in a month or two, but most take about 6 mo-year to see publication. Why? Simple, humans are slow and the editors wants quality. It simply takes time to have people read through a paper and then have the author thoughtfully respond. While there is a lot of nutty stuff in academia, journals do the best they can given the constraints. If you want decent peer review and not have full-time paid reviewers, this is the best you can get. The only thing you can do to imporve the system is to review the papers you get, and encourage your colleagues to do the same. Fabio
Re: Journal response times
In a message dated 10/15/02 11:54:01 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: While there is a lot of nutty stuff in academia Does that mean there are many nutty professors? I thought there were only two--Jerry Lewis and Eddie Murphy. :) If there are many, how could we model the market for them? :)
Re: Journal response times
I haven't had a chance to actually look at Ellison's paper, but a quick observation. A few years ago, the AER raised the submission fee substantially because, it said, the old fee of $10 was so low that people were sending papers in way too early just because AER refereeing was a cheap source of advice. Bill Sjostrom - Original Message - From: Robson, Alex [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 2:07 AM Subject: RE: Journal response times Fabio Rojas wrote: I'd say economics has a pretty decent turn around time. The following are data from a recent paper by Glenn Ellison of MIT (JPE, October 2002). The data are average times (measured in months) between initial submission and acceptance at various economics journals in the year 1999. (The full paper is available for viewing at http://web.mit.edu/gellison/www/jrnem2.pdf ): American Economic Review 21.1 Econometrica 26.3 Journal of Political Economy 20.3 Quarterly Journal of Economics 13.0 Review of Economic Studies 28.8 Canadian Journal of Economics 16.6 Economic Inquiry 13.0 Economic Journal 18.2 International Economic Review 16.8 Review of Economics and Statistics 18.8 Journal of Applied Econometrics 21.5 Journal of Comparative Economics 10.1 Journal of Development Economics 17.3 Journal of Econometrics 25.5 Journal of Economic Theory 16.4 Journal of Environmental Ec. Man. 13.1 Journal of International Economics 16.2 Journal of Law and Economics 14.8 Journal of Mathematical Economics 8.5 Journal of Monetary Economics 16.0 Journal of Public Economics 9.9 Journal of Urban Economics 8.8 RAND Journal of Economics 20.9 Journal of Accounting and Economics 11.5 Journal of Finance 18.6 Journal of Financial Economics 14.8 Alex Dr Alex Robson School of Economics Faculty of Economics and Commerce Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200. AUSTRALIA Ph +61-2-6125-4909 -Original Message- From: fabio guillermo rojas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, 14 October 2002 8:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Journal response times Anyone have any idea why the norm in economics allows referees so much time to do a report? Why its so different from other fields? Is this one of those soft vs. hard field things? Its my impression that the physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee reports. Anybody know what its like with Anthropology, Sociology, or Political Science? I'd say economics has a pretty decent turn around time. I currently work at the American Journal of Sociology and we usually get papers back to authors in less than 90 days, often 60 days. My experience is that top tier journals do better than second or third tier because they often have prestige and staff, which encourage quick reviewer response. Most sociology journals do much worse than AJS. As far as discipline goes, economics and political science is best because their is consensus on what constitutes decent research and you don't have to master every detail of a paper to assess its quality. The worst is mathematics because you really have to understand every symbol in every equation. Humanities are also bad - you don't have to understand every word, but humanities professors are very unresponsive. On another list-serv, I saw one math professor complain that a 5 page research note had spent *years* at one journal. You can get similar complaints from humanities professors. In the middle are engineering, sociolgy, education and other fields. Most journals get stuff back from 3 months to a year and these fields are in-between fast fields like economics and slow pokes like math. Fabio
RE: Journal response times
Robson, Alex wrote: The data are average times (measured in months) between initial submission and acceptance at various economics journals in the year 1999. It seems that the long times quoted in this article are something different than what fabio was talking about. I have not read the article but the above quote leads me to believe that this includes receiving multiple responses from the journals since most articles are not simply accepted on the first submission but instead require revisions. If we divide all those avg times by 2 or 3, for the multiple replies between referees and authors before acceptance, it doesn't look quite as bad (though still not great). Ben Powell __ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos More http://faith.yahoo.com
RE: Journal response times
The data are average times (measured in months) between initial submission and acceptance at various economics journals in the year 1999. It seems that the long times quoted in this article are something different than what fabio was talking about. I have not read the article but the above Hmmm... seems like the data is censored. Need to sample rejected papers too. Ok, then. I feel better about my original statement. Fabio
RE: Journal response times
Fabio Rojas wrote: I'd say economics has a pretty decent turn around time. The following are data from a recent paper by Glenn Ellison of MIT (JPE, October 2002). The data are average times (measured in months) between initial submission and acceptance at various economics journals in the year 1999. (The full paper is available for viewing at http://web.mit.edu/gellison/www/jrnem2.pdf ): American Economic Review21.1 Econometrica26.3 Journal of Political Economy20.3 Quarterly Journal of Economics 13.0 Review of Economic Studies 28.8 Canadian Journal of Economics 16.6 Economic Inquiry13.0 Economic Journal18.2 International Economic Review 16.8 Review of Economics and Statistics 18.8 Journal of Applied Econometrics 21.5 Journal of Comparative Economics10.1 Journal of Development Economics17.3 Journal of Econometrics 25.5 Journal of Economic Theory 16.4 Journal of Environmental Ec. Man. 13.1 Journal of International Economics 16.2 Journal of Law and Economics14.8 Journal of Mathematical Economics8.5 Journal of Monetary Economics 16.0 Journal of Public Economics 9.9 Journal of Urban Economics 8.8 RAND Journal of Economics 20.9 Journal of Accounting and Economics 11.5 Journal of Finance 18.6 Journal of Financial Economics 14.8 Alex Dr Alex Robson School of Economics Faculty of Economics and Commerce Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200. AUSTRALIA Ph +61-2-6125-4909 -Original Message- From: fabio guillermo rojas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, 14 October 2002 8:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Journal response times Anyone have any idea why the norm in economics allows referees so much time to do a report? Why its so different from other fields? Is this one of those soft vs. hard field things? Its my impression that the physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee reports. Anybody know what its like with Anthropology, Sociology, or Political Science? I'd say economics has a pretty decent turn around time. I currently work at the American Journal of Sociology and we usually get papers back to authors in less than 90 days, often 60 days. My experience is that top tier journals do better than second or third tier because they often have prestige and staff, which encourage quick reviewer response. Most sociology journals do much worse than AJS. As far as discipline goes, economics and political science is best because their is consensus on what constitutes decent research and you don't have to master every detail of a paper to assess its quality. The worst is mathematics because you really have to understand every symbol in every equation. Humanities are also bad - you don't have to understand every word, but humanities professors are very unresponsive. On another list-serv, I saw one math professor complain that a 5 page research note had spent *years* at one journal. You can get similar complaints from humanities professors. In the middle are engineering, sociolgy, education and other fields. Most journals get stuff back from 3 months to a year and these fields are in-between fast fields like economics and slow pokes like math. Fabio
