In the four months and change in which I have been (sole) Editor in Chief of the Journal of Economic Psychology, I have handled over 200 new submissions.
Around 75% have been desk-rejected.
Harsh? Not necessarily. The journal typically publishes less than a hundred papers per year, but receives around 700 submissions and growing. Also, the published papers include a variable number of special issues which are handled by guest editors. That is, far more than 75% of all regular submissions will be ultimately rejected. This is not different in other journals.
The reasoning for desk-rejections is simple. The worst-case scenario for both the authors and the journal is a rejection which happens after one or even two rounds of revision. That costs authors, reviewers, and editors valuable time, and is terribly inefficient. Desk-rejections are of course discouraging, but they cost authors little time, and avoid depleting the reviewer pool. The latter is an increasingly-serious concern these days. It is not always easy to find reviewers for a submitted article, and obviously once a reviewer agrees, we try to leave him/her alone for a while. The pool is finite!
Still, desk-rejecting a paper is a very unrewarding act, and one which I would very much like to avoid whenever possible. And, after desk-rejecting more than 150 papers, I do have the impression that many of those events could have been avoided.
So, how do you avoid a desk-rejection at JoEP? Here are some pointers.
First, please, please read our Guide for Authors. We really mean every word there. We have a very detailed set of policies in place, which go from editing standards to guidelines and requirements for statistical analysis (those were actually put in place by the previous Editors in 2016). I put quite a bit of work in ensuring that the Guide for Authors is consistent and reasonably complete. Yet, a surprisingly-large number of authors submit their papers without even a glance at the Guide for Authors (fortunately, that trend is decreasing). If a paper misses a couple of points (like, say, the fact that highlights are limited to 85 characters, that tables and figures go within the manuscript and not at the end, or that we use author-year APA-style citations), it will be returned to the authors for fixing. But if it is not up to our standards in statistics, formatting, language, and a dozen other points, I have to conclude that the manuscript is too far away from being acceptable, and I have no other choice than to desk-reject it. It is the authors’ job to ensure that their manuscript complies with our guidelines. We are neither an editing service nor anonymous coauthors. Sorry!
The last statement might have resulted in some raised eyebrows. Do we really desk-reject manuscripts on the basis of poor language? Well, yes and no. I insist: the time of reviewers is valuable, so (as explicitly stated in the Guide for Authors) we will definitely not send out a manuscript for refereeing if it is written in poor English (or even if it is poorly edited). This might mean returning the paper to the authors for polishing (which, with apologies, the authors could and should have done beforehand), but beyond a certain threshold we have to conclude that the paper is unlikely to ever be ready for publication, and harsh decisions will have to be made.
Second, please be aware of our policies, as clearly stated in the Guide for Authors (you might see a pattern here). We are not like every other journal in economics and/or psychology. There are some very big points that we particularly insist on. (i) Papers using deception will typically be desk-rejected, full stop. Deception is a no-go in behavioral economics, and JoEP follows this standard. While we might make an exception if deception was absolutely unavoidable for a specific research question, the burden of proof is on the authors’ side, and convenience or cost are not acceptable arguments. (ii) Experimental papers not using monetary incentives are very likely to be desk-rejected. If your findings are to be relevant for economic psychology, we want to see them established in at least a full study using proper economic incentives. Again, exceptions are possible if properly justified (and, obviously, survey studies are not expected to use incentives), but the rule stands. (iii) We are very concerned about replicability. We expect the claims in a submitted manuscript to be supported by a substantial body of evidence. This means that papers with small samples will be desk-rejected. The same applies for papers which include just a single mid-sized online study. While any threshold would be arbitrary, as the Editor in Chief I see a red flag whenever the combined sample sizes in a paper are in the double-digits domain.
Third, be aware of the journal’s scope. The Journal of Economic Psychology is a field journal, widely read by economic psychologists and behavioral economists. We are interested in specific topics. In a nutshell, we aim to publish research on the psychological foundations, mechanisms, and processes underlying economic behavior. If your research is generally at the intersection of economics and psychology, it is probably appropriate. If it just mentions both while being firmly entrenched in only one field, it is probably not. Then you will most likely be desk-rejected with an “out of scope” notice. I realize this is a bit fuzzy, but in practice many cases are clear. I am collecting a few general examples of categories leading to an out-of-scope desk-rejection and will share them in a future post. [Edit: Here is the post.]
Fourth, read the journal. I could go on and on about the standards we expect, but nothing will drive the point home like staring at the data. If you submit to JoEP, we expect you to be reasonably familiar with JoEP. Isn’t that a reasonable expectation? There are a few rules of thumb that you can apply. If your research does not quote even a single publication in JoEP, this might (but need not) be a signal that we are not interested in the topic. If your manuscript looks radically different in structure and content from papers published in JoEP, it might be a signal that you need to re-read the Guide for Authors. If you are unsure about your English-language proficiency, you might want to invest in a professional editing service or ask a native speaker or somebody with a better command of the language for help before submission. If you look at the paper again before submission and find typos, it might be a signal that you need to delay submitting and carefully triple-check the manuscript again.
The last point I want to make concerns the speed of desk-rejections. I desk-reject most papers within one or two days, some of the clear cases within hours. A few very-clear cases which landed on my inbox while I was actually looking at it have been rejected in less than an hour from submission. To my surprise, some authors have reacted angrily to this (let us not go into the psychological explanations for that). I am sorry, but I see no point in arbitrarily delaying a clear decision, and I do not have the time to file decisions and review them another day. I see around 50-60 new submissions per month: the decision to desk-reject or not is made in one go. A desk-rejection might be discouraging, but a slow desk-rejection would completely miss the point.
Carlos' Ramblings 