Tuesday 15 November 2016

For once...

I was just handling a submission at the EJ. All 3 reports were in after 54 days. Two said r+r, one said accept with revisions. Accepted conditional on some changes.

The referees were succinct and to the point, and while the paper was in some sense "competing" for some of them, they were open-minded and very fair. For once, I feel that I handled a paper the way I would like to -- more like my own experience at PNAS was, where the first round was approximately four weeks and the second, a week -- from submission to accept in five months or so, with most of that due to revisions.

Some people say it cannot be done in economics, that the field is too amorphous and standards of excellence too heterogenous for that, but I don't agree. Research is a conversation, and I don't find it reasonable to ask authors to demonstrate that what they are saying/doing is the final truth... as long as it is important and well-done. 

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