Continuing notes on the state of economics publishing, I’ve received a couple of suggestions to examine @AEAjournals semi-flagship outlets. These are the four “AEJ” journals in micro, macro, applied economics, and economic policy. Do they serve authors well? Stats & commentary:

The four journals were designed to occupy a rung just below the flagship AER. Compared to the AER’s 5.7% acceptance rate, they range from nearly identical (AE) to more than double (Micro). Stats based on 2014 submissions because the process takes sooooooo long!

All four journals beat the AER handily in terms of duration of the path to acceptance. Of course only in economics would you look at 62 weeks at the AEJ:AE and think “hey, that’s pretty good.” In medicine and the sciences they measure this duration in days.

Two of four (:EP and :AE) beat the AER in terms of time to first decision. In part this reflects higher desk reject rates, but median time to decision conditional on desk reject also looks comparable.

AEJ:Micro has developed some problems when it comes to author service. In the 12 months ending 11/1/18, they received 415 manuscripts. By the end of the period they had accepted nary a one of them; 45% of authors were still waiting for their first decision.

But let’s pull the focus back a little. These 5 journals receive on the order of 4,000 manuscripts a year and publish 5-10% of them. That’s almost exactly what JAMA does. Except JAMA has one editorial team, not 5, and renders decisions to authors in 2 weeks, not 2 months.

Why not fold all five journals into a single biweekly publication? This would eliminate the redundancy that hundreds of authors face each year when they ship an AER rejection off to an AEJ for a brand-new editorial process.

Failing that, why not have AER co-editors *automatically* ship reviews of promising-but-not-quite-AER-worthy manuscripts to the relevant AEJ, where a co-editor could immediately render a (non-binding) invitation to R&R based on their read of the manuscript & reviews?

@JakeVigdor Just out of curiosity, how did the AEJ Micro go from the highest acceptance rate (14%, more than double AEJ:AE in the chart above) to none? Was this possibly a reaction to over accepting articles in previous years?

@EmilyNix100 It could be an intentional reaction, yes. It's hard to argue that AEJ:Micro "over accepted" articles in the sense of accepted/yr>>published/yr. They were in a good steady state by that metric. But in a different sense, Micro does have the lowest journal metrics of the AEJs:

@JakeVigdor Does anyone have a list of any other elite journals that don’t accept papers? I’d like to congratulate the editors on a job well done!

@JakeVigdor wait.... econ journals have *submission* fees?

@JakeVigdor Don’t forget the referees’ time!

@JakeVigdor "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". Groucho Marx