In a previous post, I discussed desk rejections at the Journal of Economic Psychology, which I have been editing since January 1st, 2019. Here I want to pay special attention to a particular type of those: “out of scope,” that is, desk rejections indicating that “I regret to inform you that your paper is not appropriate for our audience.” The Journal of Economic Psychology publishes research which is generally at the intersection of economics and psychology. As a declaration of intentions, we are interested in the psychological foundations of and mechanisms underlying economic decisions. That covers a lot of ground, including (obviously) all of economic psychology, generally all of behavioral economics, and also nascent fields as neuroeconomics and behavioral economic theory.
Still, as the Editor in Chief, I regularly reject papers with an “out of scope” notice.
Some of them are obvious mismatches where the authors are thoroughly unfamiliar with the journal, have obviously not read the Guide for Authors, and seemingly have never read a paper from JoEP. No way to avoid those. But I have also spotted a few regularities that I want to share here, in the hope to save authors (and myself) some time, effort, and nerves.
So, here are three categories of out-of-scope articles which are showing up in my Inbox regularly.
JoEP places a strong emphasis on empirical relevance. Purely theoretical contributions (meaning: formal-analytical, math-heavy models) are certainly welcome. I seem to have multiple personalities as a researcher, and one of those is a mathematical economist and game theorist. So I will definitely not be the one rejecting theory just because it is theory. Not on my watch! However, for formal-analytical contributions to be relevant for our audience, their empirical relevance needs to be clearly established. This can be done by relying explicitly on clearly-established behavioral regularities and providing novel explanations of the (psychological) mechanisms, or by providing new data (lab or field experiments, or analysis of existing data sets) testing the postulated theories. “Armchair theorizing” which develops formal models which are neither data-driven nor empirically tested within the same manuscript will typically result in a desk-rejection.
The second example is what I like to call “macro” papers. Again, at JoEP, we are interested in the psychological foundations and determinants of economic behavior. This means that, typically, an observation is, very roughly speaking, an individual. If your paper uses a dataset where an observation is a whole nation in a given year (or a whole region in a given quarter), it is almost guaranteed that you cannot explore the psychological processes underlying the effects you discuss, and hence the paper will not be appropriate for our audience. To put it simply, analyses of highly-aggregated data sets typically follow an extremely macro approach, while we are interested in the micro dimension (or smaller). Exceptions might be possible, but the burden of convincing us of the interest of your analysis is on you. Our prior says otherwise.
The third example are country studies conducted for the sake of being country studies. We are interested in the general decision mechanisms of human beings, not in the differences across regions in Spain, states in the USA, or currently-living generations in Germany. We are interested in country- and region-specific samples if they serve to illustrate a general psychological mechanism underlying economic decisions. But if the conclusions of your paper are merely descriptive (this or that region differs from that other one along this or that dimension), without providing insights on which general psychological mechanism explains the differences, your paper is very likely to be desk rejected at JoEP.
I want to make abundantly clear that this is not a statement against research in any of those categories. I personally believe that developing formal models and exploring their internal analytical consistency is an important goal. Aggregate-level research is very important for economics, and regional and national differences are important. All those three are legitimate and relevant avenues of research. They are simply not among the topics covered by JoEP (or among the topics the editorial board feels confident handling). An out-of-scope desk rejection is merely a mismatch notice, and this post simply intends to reduce the associated inefficiency.
Carlos' Ramblings 