Instructions and Advice for Referees

High quality and timely referee reports are essential to the performance of any journal. We wish to thank you in advance for the thought, time and energy that will be going into the report that you are about to prepare.

Most referee reports must ultimately lead to a decision by a JME editor not to publish the manuscript.  (Because of space constraints, at least 80% of submitted manuscripts cannot not be published.)  At the same time, it is important that the referee and editorial evaluation provide the author with useful feedback on his manuscript even if it is not to be published in the JME.

The four week deadline for JME reports is a firm one.  If you know that you will not be able to make it when you receive a review request, please decline the assignment.  If you later learn that you will not be able to hit the deadline, please contact the editor that is handling your manuscript, with a copy to Susan North at the editorial office (north@simon.rochester.edu).

Preparing the report

In the discussion below, it is assumed that you are preparing a report on an initial submission. Writing Reports on Resubmissions provides instructions and advice for reports on second-round manuscripts.

A. The Audience

The starting point of any writing project is deciding on the audience.  For a JME report, there are really three audience members: (a) the editor; (b) the author; and (c) yourself, as an expert and a representative of the economics community.  In the discussion below, we will make suggestions about how to provide the necessary information to each member of the audience.

B. Reading the paper

Start by reading the paper quickly so as to get the key ideas. As you go, jot down a few notes about what the authors are doing and the literature context of the paper. Then, think for a while about the big picture -- what are the authors trying to do, are they taking the best approach, and how successful are they at their approach -- and then jot down some further notes about the paper and highlight any major concerns that you had on this first reading.

Then, read the paper carefully, as if it were one written by a colleague or student.  As you go through the paper, you should make notes on the following, perhaps on the margins of the paper itself:

  1. The key substantive ideas that the author is seeking to convey to the reader: (a) the topics that are being studied, (b) the tools used; (c) the logical arguments made; (d) the conclusions reached; and (e) the contribution to the literature that is being claimed by the author.
  2. Central problem areas in the paper. For theoretical papers, these are places where (a) the description of the topics is inappropriate to the actual material in the paper; (b) the theoretical constructss are being used inappropriately; (c) the logical argument is not tight, including incorrect application of economic concepts or erroneous mathematical derivations; (d) the conclusions are incorrectly made or expressed; and (e) the contribution to the literature is inaccurately described. For empirical papers, these are places where (a) the description of the topics is inappropriate to the actual material in the paper; (b) the econometric tools are being used inappropriately; (c) there is only a loose link between the economic model and the empirics; (d) the conclusions are incorrectly made or expressed; and (e) the contribution to the literature is inaccurately described.
  3. Smaller difficulties with the paper. For theoretical papers, these are (a) areas where the author's line of thought is hard to follow; (b) spots with spelling and grammatical problems; (c) areas where mathematical notation is inconsistently used or excessively complicated; (d) references to the literature that are missing or incorrect. For empirical papers, these are (a) areas where the author's line of thought is hard to follow; (b) spots with spelling and grammatical problems; (c) missing data sources and poorly constructed tables or figures; (d) references to the literature that are missing or incorrect.

C. Summarizing the paper: Write a brief summary of the paper, at most one or two pages.  In this summary, you have three objectives, one for each of the three audience members.

  1. The referee:  when you summarize the paper, without evaluation, write neutrally as you might if you were recording information for yourself or for a member of a research team that you were working in.  We do this task routinely in our work. It is part of reviewing the literature for a research project that we may be undertaking or a class that we may be preparing or a review article that we may be writing. The key is that this part of your report is like notes that you would put in your files to answer the question: "what did the author of this paper view himself as doing?".
  2. The editor: your summary of the paper may well be the place that the editor starts his review process, along with reading the introduction to the manuscript itself.  You are providing thus providing the editor with an alternative introduction to and summary of the paper.
  3. The author: your summary of the paper is a way of establishing your credibility with the author, who wants to know that you have carefully studied his paper. This takes work on your part, but avoids unnecessary hard feelings if you must later be critical of the work.  You are also providing the author with an alternative introduction to and summary of his work.  We all know that it is sometimes hard to keep perspective on where our work fits into a field, so that your summary may be very useful to the author, even if your report is subsequently critical.  For both of these purposes, credibility and information transfer, it is important to be careful with the details of your presentation, just as you would if you were preparing your own manuscript for submission.

D. Evaluating the paper: The critical question to be answered in your report is "has this manuscript made an important contribution to its chosen area?".  There are three aspects of this evaluation that are worth stressing:

  1. It is the author's responsibility to establish the fact that an important contribution has been made. Many manuscripts are correct in their internal logic and novel relative to the literature in some way, but do not themselves provide a contribution that moves a research area forward in a sufficiently important manner that they are publishable in JME.
  2. If there are critical problems that you see with the manuscript in that the author's analysis is incorrect in some manner, then it is important to state these problems clearly in your evaluation.  It is also important to state whether you see an internal inconsistency (a proof is wrong because there are contradictory elements) or an incompleteness (a proof does not cover all claimed cases).
  3. Your report should not include a recommendation about the decision category or discuss whether the manuscript is appropriate for JME in terms of its chosen area.

E. Providing Feedback to the Author: it is important that the author benefit from the hard work that you have put into reviewing the paper.  Depending on the nature and status of the paper, this feedback might include:

  1. Comments on areas where the logical argument in the paper was hard to follow, important mathematical derivations were obscure, or empirical work was incompletely described.
  2. Comments on areas where the exposition was weak.
  3. Reports on small problems organized by page.

After you have prepared these elements, assemble them into the referee report, using the format below.

Referee Report

Journal of Monetary Economics, Manuscript Number

Manuscript title

A. Summary

B. Evaluation

C. Information for the author

1.                      Larger issues

2.                      Smaller Issues (by page)

 

 

Preparing the letter to the editor

In your letter to the editor, you need to provide:

  1. A recommended decision on the manuscript without regard to its area of inquiry.  This recommendation should be based on an understanding that: (a) the Accept-Revise decision category is appropriate for small revisions that the author can and will almost certainly execute on the next revision, with only about 5% of JME manuscripts falling into this category on the first round; and (b) the Reject-Revise decision is appropriate for larger revisions that the author is likely to be able to execute successfully, with a probability of moving to Accept-Revise of at least 50% on the second round.
  2. A statement of your view as to whether the JME is the appropriate placement of the paper if you are recommending Accept-Revise or Reject-Revise.  In making this statement, you should recognize that the editors view the JME as open to submissions across a wide range of areas (see the introductory statement on the website home page for further details) and that the author has chosen to submit the manuscript to JME.  At the same time, there are clearly "readership clienteles" and "literature clusters" within journals that at times mean that a submitted manuscript is better placed at another journal.
  3. Any other information that you think will be useful to the editor in preparing a decision on the manuscript.
  4. If your report is on time, an indication of whether you would prefer the $150 honorarium (delivered via check or Paypal) or the submission certificate (good for a manuscript submission to JME within 12 months of your completed review, substituting for the $250 fee that applies to all manuscript submissions).
     

Submitting your report

Your referee report should be submitted to the JME through http://ees.elsevier.com/monec/

You will have received your USERNAME and a PASSWORD in the email that invited you to review the manuscript. If you are a new user, you may want to refer to our tips for referee use of the EES system or the tutorial on the EES website. If you have forgotten your username or password (or both), the EES system can send them directly to you (it is not necessary to find the old email or to contact the editorial office).

There are two options for submitting your report and editorial letter: you can enter material directly (copying it from your wordprocessor, with the understanding that not all characters will transfer) or you can submit documents as files.  For additional details about the latter process, including instructions on how to remove information that may identify you as the referee, return to the main referee page.

 

Frequently asked questions

 

Q1: I am not sure what to recommend in terms of an editorial decision on a particular paper. How should I make this call?  

A1: It may be helpful to look at the chart below, which shows a decision tree for first round and second round manuscripts at JME.  Most manuscripts are going to be rejected on the first round.  In any event, the editor will ultimately make this part of the decision: it is your responsibility to provide him with a clear and careful analysis of the paper.

 

Q2: If most manuscripts are going to be rejected, why should I spend my time writing detailed reports that recommend how to revise the paper?

A2: Detailed referee reports are very important.  For an editor to allow a “revise and resubmit” decision, he must think that there is at least a 50% chance that a manuscript will ultimately be published in JME.  To decide whether the paper falls above or below the critical level, it is necessary for him to a good bit of detailed information about what form a revision might take. As an expert in this field, you are in a good position to recommend a revision path.

Further, by providing the author with detailed revision advice, you are helping him figure out how to best revise his paper for another journal, if it is rejected.  Each year, the JME receives many emails from authors that are grateful for the referee reports and editorial feedback that they received on their rejected papers.  Typically, authors say something like “it was not good news that my paper was rejected, but I learned a lot about how to make the paper better and, in that way, the submission to JME was very valuable to me even though my revised paper will be sent elsewhere.”