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 (Because of space constraints, at least 80% of submitted manuscripts cannot not be published.)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that the referee and editorial evaluation provide the author with useful feedback on his manuscript even if it is not to be published in the JME.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:
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.
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:
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:
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)
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Preparing the letter to the editor
In your letter to the editor, you need to provide:
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.”