On “other journals”, I can only speak for Elsevier journals. There are three positive developments. (1) The switch from paper to electronic submissions has substantially cut the processing time — papers being mailed around the world, papers sitting in offices waiting for the editor to return from a conferences, and papers getting lost. (2) Acceptance to pre-publication on the web is 14 days or less. (3) Galley-proofed to print is being capped at 6 months.

Mind you, all this is driven by Elsevier’s medical journals. Economics journals are free-riders on these technological advances.

The crucial delay is the time it takes to review. As an editor, one has limited control — although some editors use that, and others do not.

I pretty much agree that the delays have gotten “too long.” But, if there was no cost to submitting to elite journals, I suspect they would see substantially more submissions that might be costly to review. This is the basic point that Azar made.

But, along the lines of the argument you made, in his July 2007 paper,
Is Peer Review in Decline? Glenn Ellison finds evidence that some elite authors are indeed by-passing peer reviewed outlets. He argues that this is due to the factors mentioned above: long times to publication and arduous revise and resubmit cycles. Certainly bepress, Economic Inquiry, and others are innovating around these issues. Still, mediocre authors seem to put up with the current system as they have fewer alternatives than elite ones. It will be interesting to see if other journals follow the lead of bepress and Economic Inquiry.

thanks for your thoughts and the links. Just on one point where I happen to strongly disagree. You write:

“In a sense, the lag in the review process might be optimal. A publication of most any sort is valuable to the author and one in a leading journal of course has a very substantial return.”

This kind of rationing does not make sense to me. Long turnover will discourage outstanding as well as mediocre authors alike, so fewer submissions will occur across the quality spectrum. An easier and more efficient way for a journal to reduce submissions would be to return every other submission without even looking at it.

Cheers

Ekkehart

More broadly, social norms do change, and they’ve changed in this very area. Glen Ellison has two very interesting papers on this point: The Slowdown of the Economics Publishing Process and
Evolving Standards for Academic Publishing: A q-r Theory. Both of these were in the July, 2002 Journal of Political Economy (a top-ranked journal for the non-economists out there). The slowdown paper finds that the time from submission to final acceptance has dramatically increased since 1970 or so. Little of the increase is due to more complex papers or “first response time.” Instead, it seems to come from more extensive revisions.

He also finds that papers have gotten quite a bit longer in economics as well as in other fields in the last few decades. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that back then “revise and resubmit” was rare. Economic Inquiry seems to have recognized this and they let authors submit their papers to an up or down review.

My take-home message here is that not only do norms change, but with some effort by journal editors, they could change again. Or, like Economic Inquiry, they can address the long lags to publication in other innovative ways.

It is really exciting that RePEc offers near-real time citation counts of working papers; this is indeed a place where it can make a huge contribution. This is useful not just for “Top Items,” but for counting the few cites that many of us likely to get.

To help RePEc more accurately count cites, one could imagine permanent RePEc “handles” for papers (handles identify RePEc resources). In turn, we’d put these handles in our bibliographies for RePEc software to read for more accurate citation counts. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that about 1/3 of papers in RePEc don’t have their citations extracted because of the technical difficulties of doing so. After all, papers are written for people, not computers (this is subset of a larger point made by proponents of the “Semantic Web” made about web pages and why searches can be so maddening). I understand that making RePEc handles permanent is non-trivial and getting economists to add another item to bibliographies is quite a hill to climb, but it may well be worth it if we really want to stress one of RePEc’s strengths.

It turns out that this and more is discussed in my paper that I mentioned above: Next Steps in the Information Infrastructure in Economics. More self-promotion I guess…

This is where RePEc has something to contribute. Indeed, the citation analysis we do is focused on working papers, because this is what we can access the most readily. Thus, you do not need to wait for the citing paper to be published. Furthermore, it takes about a month for a citation to be analyzed, which may be shorter than other citation services. If you consider the recently released discounted citation counts (citations in more recent papers count more), then this will tell you what is being cited frequently very recently. As the link indicates, these are not necessarily recent papers, though. But we can indeed sort this list to lindicate only the very recent papers (say, last three years).

Economics journals are slow for two reasons. First, economists tend to write longer and more complicated papers than the typical natural scientist. One-point-per-paper short contributions are much easier to assess. My experience (own papers, Energy Economics) suggests that short papers get through peer-review faster. Second, and perhaps more important, there is a culture of long delays in economics. Many economics referees wait several months before they start working on their review, and then rush things anyway. If I review for an environmental sciences journal, I have the editor on my back within four weeks. This has never happened to me for an economics journal. If culture is indeed the problem, institutional or technical change will not accelerate the review process.

Citations are the only true test for the quality of a paper. Good papers stand the test of time, and only time can tell whether your paper is really good. That said, you do not need to wait till you’ve passed the 100 citations mark to tell whether a paper has potential. Good papers accumulate citations much faster than bad papers.

IDEAS/RePEc can make a contribution here.

“Top items” now has total citations over the lifetime of a paper.

One can also think of a ranking on the basis of citations in the last 12 months only, or filter the current top items for papers that are less than 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years old. That would quickly reveal the papers with the potential to make it into the pantheon of seminal contributions.

Richard