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Journal of Economic Literature: Editorial PolicyEditorial PolicyThe editorial policy of the Journal of Economic Literature is explained by Roger Gordon, Editor of the JEL, in the Editor's Note on this page.
The Journal of Economic LiteratureEditor's NoteThe Journal of Economic Literature's purpose is to help economists keep up with the ever-increasing volume of economics research. This goal is effected by publishing survey articles and essays, book reviews, and an extensive bibliographic guide to the contents of current economics periodicals. Survey Articles and EssaysArticles are usually commissioned by the Editor, though unsolicited articles are sometimes published. Those interested in writing an article for the Journal are requested to begin with an outline of roughly five to ten pages, describing the contents of the proposed article, stating why the topic is deserving of our readers' attention, and listing the main references to be covered. The outline can be submitted for consideration on the Journal website. (see Correspondence). If the editor feels that the topic is of potential interest for the Journal, the outline will be sent to referees who are experts in the field. If they see a promising Journal article, the author is then invited to write it. The full article also is refereed. Most of the articles that have appeared in the Journal have gone through several rounds of revision before being ready for publication; the Journal is not an outlet for authors seeking to get into print quickly. Writing for the Journal of Economic LiteratureThe Journal's survey articles and essays seek to synthesize recent research on topics of broad interest within the profession. The Journal aims to give the core areas of economics thorough attention, while being open to an eclectic range of topics that stretch the boundaries of economics. A successful Journal article has three features: clear motivation for the importance of the questions being addressed, accessible exposition, selective coverage of the relevant literature, and synthesis. The intended audience is professional economists, but not just those working on the topic of any given paper. In writing for a broader audience, the first requirement of a successful paper is to layout what we as economists should hope to know about an issue, and why. What then do we know, with what confidence, and what questions and debates remain. Accessible exposition does not entail trivialization. Technicalities are needed in economics research. We do not really understand a new idea, nor know whether it is correct, until it has been rigorously modeled. We cannot do empirical work properly without painstaking attention to the econometrics. But after the modeling has been completed or the regressions run, the essential findings should be expressible in plain English. To quote the biologist Stephen J. Gould, "We must all pledge ourselves to recovering accessible science as an honorable intellectual tradition. The rules are simple: no compromises with conceptual richness; no bypassing of ambiguity or ignorance; removal of jargon, of course, but no dumbing down of ideas."1 If it is an important idea, it can be put into everyday words. Prospective Journal authors might study D. N. McCloskey's useful guide, The Writing of Economics,2 and heed George Orwell's warnings about poor writing habits in "Politics and the English Language."3 Literature coverage, the second ingredient, means addressing work that is both significant and pertinent. A Journal article should not only explain what is known about the subject, it should also highlight those questions that are unresolved and that deserve to be the focus of future research. It should be detailed enough that the reader can infer what research methods were used in the surveyed work. Thoroughness, however, does not preclude discrimination. The reader should be told what work is most important and most convincing. A mere catalogue of who said what, exhaustively summarizing every article ever published in the area, is uninformative. It is better to risk offending people who have written in the field by not mentioning them than to bore the reader. When a field is marked by controversy and disagreement, the author should indicate the sources and substance of the disagreement. It is acceptable, even desirable, that the author's point of view show through, provided opposing points of view are explained fully and fairly. The crucial ingredient of a successful Journal article, and perhaps the hardest to achieve, is synthesis. An effective synthesis is informative not only to economists outside the field but also to specialists. Ideas complement each other: they are worth more when combined than when separate. Synthesis gives a distinctive, and perhaps heretofore missing, shape to a subject. Synthesis often produces a clear statement of the important unanswered questions. Synthesizing scattered research adds as much value, and requires as much imagination and creativity, as doing the original research. The need for the Journal as a record of the state of economics knowledge is heightened by the technological advances in electronic publishing. As Hal Varian puts it, "In the future everything will be published, in the sense of being readily available, but the need for filtering will be even greater than it is now. Thus, more filtering will be done after the material is published."4 The Journal's survey articles and essays do this filtering. Much time can be saved by writing from the start in the Journal's style, as described in the Style Guide; note especially the style for references. Book ReviewsNew books in economics are first annotated by the Journal's Pittsburgh editorial office, and then some of these are selected for review. Please send books for review to the Pittsburgh office. Books that are well-researched and make original contributions to economics will tend to be those selected for review. Textbooks will not be reviewed. Collections of previously published articles will not be reviewed unless some value is added by bringing the articles together. Edited volumes such as festschrifts and conference volumes will be reviewed only if they are in some way distinctive; an edited volume is more likely to be reviewed if it is covering a single, coherent theme rather than mixing papers on a wide assortment of topics. Most reviews are short (up to 900 words). A review should be written so as to inform a wide readership of professional economists, explaining what the book is about and enabling a prospective reader to decide whether to read the book. For books of particular importance for the profession, longer reviews may be commissioned. As a matter of policy, the Journal does not publish unsolicited reviews, nor does it accept offers to review specific books. The Journal does, however, welcome general expressions of interest from American Economic Association members who would like to review books. Bibliographic InformationA complete list of articles published in economics along with some abstracts (currently from about 800 journals) is available electronically on EconLit. A subset of this information (covering about 210 journals) appeared in the printed Journal of Economic Literature through December 1999. The bibliographic sections of JEL now appear in JEL on CD and in hyperlinked format in e-JEL which cover all the journals indexed in EconLit during the last quarter. See the March 2000 JEL Editor's Note for further information. EconLit can be accessed online through libraries that subscribe to the DIALOG, EBSCOHOST, OCLC, OVID, and SilverPlatter services. Many libraries provide Web access to EconLit. Individual American Economic Association members may subscribe to a low-priced shortened version of EconLit, covering the last 10-12 years. Roger H. Gordon March 2005
___________________________ 1Stephen J. Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural
History, New York, Norton, 1991, p. 12.
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