How to Actually Navigate the Journal Of Economic Issues Without Losing Your Mind
The Journal of Economic Issues is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. It covers institutional economics, evolutionary economics, feminist economics, and other heterodox approaches that mainstream journals tend to ignore or dismiss. If you're trying to publish in it or cite from it, here's what actually matters. You need a subscription or institutional access through your university. Taylor & Francis Online hosts the full archive. Some articles are open access, but the majority require a paywall. I've had colleagues who subscribed personally just to get consistent access — it runs about $400 a year if you're buying individual subscriptions, which is ridiculous, so check whether your university already has it covered before you spend anything. For citing older issues, JSTOR carries the full run back to 1967, but the formatting for citations differs slightly between platforms. Just pick one style and stick with it. EndNote handles both without issue.
What Makes This Journal Different
Most economics journals run on neoclassical assumptions. The Journal of Economic Issues explicitly publishes work that questions those foundations. That means you'll find articles on money and banking, economic history, methodology, and development that don't fit the standard DSGE template. If your work is conventional in any way, this probably isn't the right venue. The editors want institutional and contextual analysis, not elegant models with dubious assumptions. One thing beginners miss: the journal prefers papers that engage with economic history and institutional context even when making theoretical arguments. A purely abstract paper with no historical grounding gets sent out faster than you'd expect. I've seen well-written formal models rejected because the authors treated institutions as exogenous rather than as something worth explaining.
Publishing There — The Practical Reality
Submission goes through Taylor & Francis's editorial system. You'll want to read at least five recent issues before you submit. The editorial bar isn't about mathematical sophistication — it's about whether you actually understand the institutional tradition you're working within. Papers that misrepresent Veblen or Commons or Institutional economics get immediate desk rejection. I watched a submission get bounced in three days because the author cited the wrong Veblen text entirely. The peer review process typically runs 4 to 8 months. Revisions are common and usually substantive. Don't treat reviewer comments as optional suggestions. One of my graduate students spent six weeks rewriting a literature review section after the first round — the reviewers flagged that she was citing contemporary work without engaging the foundational texts. She came back with a much stronger paper.
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A Specific Problem I Ran Into
I once tried to submit a paper on monetary institutionalism and hit a wall with the reference formatting. The journal requires Oxford-style footnotes, not author-date parenthetical citations. I had my references in BibTeX formatted for APA, and converting over 80 citations manually was going to take hours. What I ended up doing was using Zotero with the Oxford Handbook of Economics style file, exporting to Word, and then doing a careful manual pass to catch the few entries that the style plugin didn't handle correctly. Saved me probably 3 or 4 hours of fiddling. If your work uses standard econometric methods to test neoclassical hypotheses, publish elsewhere. Annals of Economics and Finance or Economic Inquiry will be a better match. The Journal of Economic Issues also doesn't publish purely mathematical papers — there's no audience for that here, and the editors know it. Be honest about where your work belongs before you invest time in tailoring a submission. The journal has a small but dedicated readership. Impact factor is modest by economics standards, roughly 0.8 to 1.2 depending on the year. If you're evaluating it for tenure or promotion at a mainstream institution, that's worth factoring in. At heterodox or institutional economics programs, it carries weight. Know your audience.
