This is the second entry in a short guide for prospective authors of the Journal of Economic Psychology. The first entry contained a short overview. This entry discusses how to decide whether your paper is appropriate for the journal.
Although the final word on whether your manuscript is appropriate for the journal or not lies with the editors, here are a few easy criteria.
Field. The Journal of Economic Psychology is the highest-impact journal (according to 2021 Impact Factors) in behavioral economics and economic psychology. We publish research in these fields. We are not a “general interest” journal (whatever that strange expression might mean: sciences are, by definition, specialized). We do not cover all of economics, and we do not cover all of psychology. If you study the impact of certain purely-economic variables on other purely-economic variables, chances are we are not interested. Where is the psychology? The same goes for purely psychological papers. The closest fields to ours within economics, with which there are certainly overlaps, are microeconomics and experimental economics, but we will generally desk-reject papers with a macroeconomic focus. The closest fields within psychology, again with important overlaps, are social and cognitive psychology, but we will generally desk-reject papers with a focus on health psychology or psychiatry. There is quite an intersection of our fields with judgment and decision making, but practically none with sociology. This is absolutely not any kind of judgment on any of those fields. We are the Journal of Economic Psychology, and we cover specific fields and not others. That’s all!
Empirical focus. We place a very, very strong emphasis on empirical relevance. While purely theoretical contributions are generally welcome (and, being active in mathematical economics myself, I personally appreciate theoretical work), the empirical relevance of prospective JoEP contributions should be clearly established. In principle, it might be possible to do this by relying explicitly on extant, well-known behavioral regularities and providing novel explanations of their (psychological) mechanisms (this is an excellent example of that). But the gold standard is to provide new data (lab or field experiments, surveys) testing the postulated theories. New data analyses on existing data sets (e.g., panel surveys or existing, publicly available datasets) also qualify. Our empirical focus has the consequence that certain types of work are not a good fit for us (see below), although they are of course perfectly valid scientific contributions. Again, we cover only certain kinds of work.
Level of analysis. At JoEP, we are interested in the psychological foundations and determinants of economic behavior. For us, typically and roughly speaking, an observation is either an individual or an individual decision. Highly-aggregated datasets where an observation is a nation or a region in a year or a month are, generally speaking, not appropriate for our purposes. It is very hard to use such data to actually explore the psychological processes underlying individual economic decisions, and hence we will generally not be interested. To put it simply, we are interested in the micro dimension (or smaller, e.g. decision processes), and papers following a macro approach are not a good fit for us.
Type of manuscript. We currently publish five types of contributions. Research Articles are standard scientific manuscripts, limited to 12,000 words. Brief Reports are our equivalent of research notes, limited to 4,000 words (the Online Appendix does not count). Examples of those are focused reports on single empirical studies, data re-analyses for new purposes, variants of previously-published empirical studies (especially those published in the journal), and short formal-analytical contributions linked to well-established empirical phenomena. Replications, also limited to 4,000 words, are notes reporting on replications of previous work. Reviews are content-based (not bibliometric!) surveys of a subfield, with the expectation that the authors are experts in that field and capable of organizing it along content-based lines (see here for our views on reviews and surveys). Last, Book Reviews (which are often commissioned) are exactly that: short, focused reviews of a new book in our or related fields. If a manuscript does not fit in one of these categories, it is not a good fit for us.
Out of experience, there are a number of manuscript types which are regularly submitted to JoEP but are simply not good fits, and that we regularly desk-reject. If your manuscript belongs to one of the following categories, you should probably submit elsewhere (one of the objectives of this post is to stop those submissions). Again, this is not a judgment of any kind! We simply cannot and do not cover the entire spectrum of scientific contributions.
- Pure-theory contributions without clearly-demonstrated and immediate empirical relevance. See above! We occasionally relax this constraint for Special Issues, where the overall empirical relevance is established within the special issue, not necessarily the paper.
- Narrative discussions, opinion pieces, and position papers. Again, we have a strong focus on empirical relevance. There is no other way to put it: we are mostly an empirical, data-centered journal. We mostly understand two languages: stats and maths. The only kind of article where an organized verbal discussion of a literature without new data is interesting to us are reviews and literature surveys (see above).
- That being said, bibliometric work (including most “systematic reviews”) is out of scope for us. Surveys need to be content-based. Again, see this post on that.
- Technical contributions on research methods not including specific, worked-out data applications. There are other journals for that.
- Simulation work without an empirical (behavioral) counterpart. This includes most agent-based models. We have nothing against those, but at JoEP we focus on actual human behavior, not on the exploration of models. There are other, excellent journals focusing on that. I actually work on agent-based models myself, but would not submit that kind of work to JoEP. It would be a mismatch!
- Country studies. While we always consider interesting and novel datasets, we are only interested on them as long as they provide generalizable findings which improve our understanding of the psychological foundations of economic decision making. Country studies (or socio-cultural ones), while interesting, are in themselves out of the scope of our journal, and previous lack of coverage of a certain variable for a certain country is not a selling point for us. If the point of your article is that a certain phenomenon is known but has not been yet studied in country X, we will typically not be interested, irrespective of X. If you are interested on a very particular institutional framework which only makes sense in country X, we will also not be interested, unless you can tell us why that teaches us something generalizable about human (economic) behavior. And yes, we have desk-rejected articles because they were too specifically tailored to the case of the U.S. This is not about one country or another! This last point needs some further precision. Sometimes, particular constellations of local institutional regulations, or even a natural events, create the conditions for a natural experiment which illuminates a certain aspect of human behavior. Those are extremely valuable. See this example, and this one, and this one, and even this one. The point is that the focus must be the generalizable aspect of human behavior that is illuminated, and not the local event in itself.
Some previous discussion of categories we do not cover can be found in this previous post.
Continued in Part III: The Big Standards.
Carlos' Ramblings 