Economics Journal Comprehensive

How to Actually Navigate Economics Journal Submissions Without Losing Your Mind

I spent years reading submissions and later dealing with my own before getting into publishing. The Academic Journal Comprehensive landscape in economics is more bureaucratic than most people expect. Here is what you need to know before you start typing up your manuscript. Economics journals operate on a tiered system that is not officially ranked but everyone in the field treats as real. The top five journals (AER, QJE, JPE, Econometrica, and RES) have acceptance rates below 5%. The rest of the field splits into specialized journals by subfield, then general interest journals, then regional and lower-tier outlets. Most graduate students and early-career researchers underestimate how much the tier matters for their career trajectory, especially outside of top-10 programs. A comprehensive economics journal typically publishes survey articles, literature reviews, and sometimes empirical work that spans multiple subfields. If you are looking at something like the Journal of Economic Literature or the Journal of Economic Perspectives, those are examples of comprehensive outlets. They require a different writing style than technical papers. You are not proving a theorem; you are synthesizing existing work and framing new directions. That is harder than it sounds because you cannot hide behind mathematical elegance.

Choosing the Right Journal for Your Work

This is where most people waste months. I had a colleague once submit a solid empirical paper to the American Economic Review because the topic was broad enough. It was desk-rejected in three days because the paper was methodologically specialized and belonged in a field journal. The review process alone takes six to eighteen months at good journals. Wasting that timeline on a mismatched submission is a real problem. Before you write a single word, read five recent papers from your target journal. Not the abstracts. The actual papers. Notice the length, the mathematical density, the empirical strategy, and how they frame contributions. If your paper looks fundamentally different from what they publish, pick another journal. There is no shame in that. It saves you a year of your life. For a proper Economics Journal Comprehensive approach, you should maintain a tracking spreadsheet. Columns for journal name, submission date, desk rejection or review decision, reviewer comments, revision status, and final outcome. I have seen people submit to twelve journals over three years without any record of what happened. That is amateur behavior and it compounds mistakes.

Writing for an Economics Journal

The standard structure in economics is not optional. Introduction, Model or Empirical Strategy, Data, Results, Conclusion. Deviate from this and reviewers will notice. Some comprehensive journals are slightly more flexible with the introduction length, but the body of the paper must follow convention. Reviewers read hundreds of submissions. A non-standard structure forces them to work harder, and that creates friction. The introduction is the most important section. In economics, it serves two functions simultaneously: it tells the reader what the paper does and it justifies why anyone should care. Lead with the main result, not the literature. State your identification strategy clearly in the first few paragraphs. Technical audiences do not want to wait twenty pages to understand your causal approach. I once reviewed a paper where the author buried the instrumental variable discussion in an appendix and spent six pages on motivation. It was rejected because the methodological core was inaccessible. For comprehensive journal articles, the literature synthesis section needs to be genuinely comprehensive, not just a listing of papers. Group work by theme or method. Identify genuine gaps. A paper that says "nobody has studied X" without showing why X matters is weak. Show the implications of the gap.

Handling Peer Review

Peer review in economics is thorough and often blunt. Reviewers will find errors in your math, your empirical specification, and your interpretation. Do not take it personally. I received a review letter once that was essentially a line-by-line critique of my robustness checks. Two of the issues were legitimate. I had made a coding error in one specification and had omitted a relevant control variable in another. The third issue was a misunderstanding that I could have addressed more clearly. The revision took me six weeks and the paper was eventually accepted at a respectable but not top-tier journal. When you get reviewer comments, categorize them into three buckets: mandatory changes that address real flaws, suggested changes that improve the paper, and misunderstandings that need correction. Address every single one. Even the ones you disagree with. Write a response letter that quotes each comment and explains your change or your reasoning for keeping the original text. Reviewers and editors read these letters. Ignoring a comment is a fast track to rejection on revision.

Common Pitfalls That Sink Submissions

The biggest mistake I see is overclaiming. Economics journals penalize papers that claim causal significance when the identification is weak. If you are using OLS with controls, do not write "we establish causality." Write "we identify associations conditional on X." The difference matters to reviewers. Another pitfall is insufficient robustness. In applied microeconomics especially, reviewers expect placebo tests, alternative specifications, and falsification exercises. Skipping these is a red flag. I once saw a paper rejected for exactly this reason. The author had a clean result but no falsification test. The reviewer noted that the result could be driven by a confounding trend and the author had not ruled that out. The paper was dead. Data transparency is now a near-universal requirement. Most journals expect you to make code and data available. Some require pre-registration of hypotheses. If your data comes from a proprietary source that cannot be shared, document exactly what you can share and what you cannot. Hiding data availability is treated as suspicious.

The Economics Journal Comprehensive Resource

If you want a single Economics Journal Comprehensive reference that covers the full landscape, I recommend starting with the IDEAS/RePEc journal rankings and the NSF's list of designated journals. Cross-reference those with the publications required by your home institution. They sometimes differ. Some departments require top-five publications for tenure. Others value field-journal impact equally. Knowing your department's actual requirements before you start submitting is critical. There are also comprehensive databases like the NBER working paper series index and the SSRN economics network that let you track which journals are publishing work in your niche. Use them. They are free and they reveal trends in what editors are looking for.

Realistic Timeline Expectations

A well-targeted paper at a solid field journal typically takes fourteen to twenty-four months from submission to publication. Top journals can take longer because of multiple rounds of revision. Comprehensive journals that publish survey work often move faster, maybe eight to fourteen months, because the review process is less technical. Plan your career timeline accordingly. If you need a publication by a certain date, start early and submit to a journal whose timeline matches your constraints. I learned this the hard way. I had a job market candidate who needed a paper accepted before graduation. She targeted a journal with an average decision time of nine months. She submitted at the beginning of her final year. The paper went through two revisions and was accepted with twenty weeks to spare. If she had picked a top-five journal, she would have been graduated without it. The choice of venue was the single most important decision she made during her PhD.

Practical Tips That Actually Matter

Get your formatting right before you submit. Many journals reject papers on first submission for not following their style guide. Download a recent issue, copy the formatting exactly, and check every reference. Incomplete references are the easiest thing to fix and the most annoying thing for reviewers. Write a cover letter that is actually useful. Do not repeat the abstract. Tell the editor which section of the journal your paper fits, why it matters to their readership, and whether there are any conflicts of interest. Editors appreciate brevity. One paragraph is enough. Consider sharing your working paper on SSRN or your university's repository before submission. This establishes priority and gets your work into the community faster. Some journals allow this. A few do not. Check the policy.

And finally, if your paper gets rejected, read the reviews carefully, revise strategically, and resubmit somewhere else within two weeks. Sitting on a rejected paper for six months hoping you will magically feel motivated to fix it does not work. The rejection is data. Use it.