This is the fourth entry in a short guide for prospective authors of the Journal of Economic Psychology. The first entry contained a short overview. The second discussed which papers are appropriate for the journal. The third reviewed the big “red flags,” in terms of journal policies. This one tackles familiarity with the journal.
As I stated in previous entries, we are not a “general interest” journal, and we do not wish to become one. We are not exchangeable with other journals, not even within the broad fields of behavioral economics and economic psychology. We are interdisciplinary. Our readership spans both economics and psychology, and is made up of researchers interested in both. We have standards, and we follow through on certain subfields and research agendas, from behavioral biases, decision processes, or the effects of personality on economic decisions to self-control or tax compliance. We do expect prospective authors to be familiar with our journal, and very especially with related publications in our journal.
Ideally, that means regularly reading our journal and attending our conference (we are the official journal of the IAREP; we have a yearly conference). But here is a simpler test: if your manuscript does not relate to even a single previous publication in our journal, are you sure our readership is the audience you seek? It might be, but you are already fighting an uphill battle. A simple search in our homepage will show you what we have covered in the recent (or not so recent) years!
The most important thing that you could and should do to demonstrate familiarity with the journal, though, is a much simpler one: Read our Guide for Authors. Contrary to other journals, our Guide for Authors is formulated and maintained by the editors, and we do expect prospective authors to have read it. We have specific journal policies in place, which go from statistical standards (there is no such thing as “significant at 10%” in our journal, and if your manuscript contains that expression anywhere, it will be returned to you or desk-rejected) to submission conditions (we do not allow double-blind submissions; do write your name on the manuscript) and formatting issues (we really dislike the outdated custom of collecting tables and figures at the end; do integrate them in the text). All those and more are explained in the Guide for Authors, and all you have to do to make sure you do not commit any of a number of mistakes is read it.
Reading the Guide for Authors might actually save you time. For instance, we do not expect Highlights on initial submission, so don’t bother with those until you are asked for a revision. And did you know that any cover letter is a “red flag” for us? Yes, it is: Cover letters are only used to inform us of policy violations or other problems with your manuscript. No problem? No letter!
If any of the statements above comes as a surprise to you, you really, really need to carefully read our Guide for Authors. In fact, you should read it in any case. After all, you are asking the editors and reviewers of our journal to invest their time in your manuscript, so investing your time in reading our Guide for Authors and making sure that you respect our policies and conventions is just basic reciprocity.
Apart from the Guide for Authors, there are other resources which will help you get up-to-speed with respect to our journal. One is this very blog, so well done! Another is the latest editorial.
And the last thing. Did you carefully consider all checks raised upon submission? When you log in to Editorial Manager, ready to submit, the interface will ask you to confirm a long (sorry for that) list of points related to our policies. There are reasons for those. We (the editors) put them there deliberately, and you do need to consider them carefully. Actually, if you have read the Guide for Authors, those checks should be a breeze for you. But if your manuscript fails to comply with even just one of those points, it is time to interrupt the submission (don’t worry: all is saved) and edit the article. Clicking through those checks without reading them is a waste of time (yours and ours): your article will just be returned to you, and you run the risk of a desk-rejection if we judge that your manuscript is simply too far away from our standards. Besides, what message does it send to submit a manuscript violating a policy after explicitly stating that it complies with it?
This last point is really important. We all know how it goes. You are nearing the final submission click and you really want the manuscript to be gone from your desk. When you realize that there is that little, pesky policy that your manuscript does not really comply with, the temptation to just click through and be done with it is strong. Regrettably, that impulsive two-second reaction might well end up costing you weeks. All that is going to happen is that your manuscript will fail our checks, and might end up in a virtual pile until we find the time to return it to you. Because, you see, we receive a lot of submissions, time is scarce, and we do tend to give priority to polished papers which comply with our policies, not to submissions which ignore them. So the optimal reaction if you notice a problem with your submission is to stop and edit.
Stay tuned for the next, final part of this open letter: Triple Check!
Carlos' Ramblings 