> >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
