Writing support for your research: How to critically analyse a paper (peer review)

The review process for academic journals in economics has grown vastly more extensive over time. Journals demand more revisions, and papers have become bloated with numerous robustness checks and extensions. Even if the extra resulting revisions do on average lead to improved papers--a claim that is debatable--the cost is enormous. We argue that much of the time involved in these revisions is a waste of research effort. Another cause for concern is the level of disagreement amongst referees, a pattern that suggests a high level of arbitrariness in the review process. To identify and highlight what is going right and what is going wrong in the reviewing process, we wrote to a sample of former editors of the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics, and asked them for their thoughts about what might improve the process. We found a rough consensus that referees for top journals in economics tend to make similar, correctable mistakes. The italicized quotations throughout this paper are drawn from our correspondence with these editors and our own experience. Their insights are consistent with our own experiences as editors at the Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies. Our objective is to highlight these mistakes and provide a roadmap for how to avoid them.

Our purpose for this article is to provide suggestions on how to get your high quality research published from the perspectives of reviewers. First, good writing is good thinking, and you are much more likely to succeed when you combine good writing with sound research. We then offer an eight-step method of reviewing that may help the author better understand how to present and understand the research. Next, we describe ways to identify high quality journals, including acceptance rates, impact factor, Eigenfactors, and Article Influence scores. In the following section, we address common criteria used to rate articles, possible decisions, and how to revise the manuscript in response to reviewers’ comments. We present an example table of responses to reviewers’ critiques. We conclude with further advice for more novice researchers. Become a reviewer to help you better understand the process and peers’ expectations. Highlight the caliber of your research by citing journal metrics when being considered for promotion or hiring. Finally, frame negative reviews as an opportunity to improve your work and keep trying to publish your research despite criticisms.