Reflections of a former editor

I became the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the New Zealand Economic Papers (NZEP) early in my career. About 4 years after my PhD, I was fortunate to being appointed EIC. I started being responsible for NZEP in March 2020, about 3 weeks before the first COVID-19 lockdown. Over my 4-year stint as EIC, I oversaw 208 submissions. Of these, I rejected 62%. Put differently, I made somewhere around 260 enemies, but I also managed to oversee the publication of 79 papers.

In the following, I want to reflect on some of the lessons I learned and answer some of the question I get asked about being an editor.

Starting with some numbers, during my time as EIC, we managed to be listed on the Web of Science and increased our SJR rating from 0.18 to 0.4 (being a Q2 Journal). To compare these numbers, consider the ratings of journals published in Australia: Australian Economic Review (Q3, 0.25), Australian Economic Papers (Q2, 0.45) and the Economic Record (Q3, 0.35). If you wondered, the American Economic Review has an SJR score of 20.36. We also increased downloads, citations and royalties.

Let me offer some reflections on the publishing process. I think one of the key attributes of an editor is to be organized and to work unrelentingly. So, when I received an email informing me about a new submission (which sometimes could take a day after the submission was made in the system), I would immediately have a look at the submission. I desk rejected north of 30% of all submissions. These were submissions which clearly had no chance to pass the referee process and I wanted to save myself, the referees and the author(s) time.

Most often, the desk rejection decision was based on one of two reasons: (i) the method was clearly flawed (an informative test for empirical papers is to search for words such as ‘exogenous’, ‘endogenous’ or ‘causation’ in a manuscript and see whether something comes up at all) or (ii) the topic was of no interest to New Zealand and the authors did not even try to relate the findings to New Zealand (or the Pacific region).

A memorable example was a paper which addressed an interesting and relevant research question, but the sample size was, well let’s say it was small. Looking at the tables presented in the paper, I started wondering about the descriptive statistics (all numbers ending in .33 or .66) until I realized that the sample size was 3. Replication crisis – what crisis? It reminded me of a lecture when I was an undergrad student. I thought I might take a paper on organizational management. In the first lecture, the professor showed some intriguing research results of himself showing a perfect regression line with N = 7 between two factors I forgot. After questioning the approach, the professor said ‘You must be studying econometrics? Here, we are doing frontier research!’ I dropped the paper after this lecture.

Then, an eternal challenge is to find referees. I would say that about 70% of referee invitations are declined or are non-responses. So, if you want to have two referee reports, you have to invite up to six referees! If you wonder why it takes time to you receive your editorial decision: this is it. Finding appropriate referees, waiting on them to accept or decline the invitation, and then waiting on the referee reports takes most of the time. Then, I would wait on the recommendation from the Associate Editor, which typically would arrive soon after the referee reports are in. I have always followed the recommendation from my AEs. I would read the AE comments, the referee reports and then cross-check with the paper. Sometimes I would highlight specific points to the author(s) for the revision and advise them to ignore some point made by the referee.

As an author, you sometimes wonder whether a revision has really improved your paper or whether you just added 20 more robustness checks for an appendix nobody reads. I would say that for most papers the first revision generally improved the paper, but it is downhill from there. Thinking back about the referee reports I have read, I have to say that while some take a very long time, they are generally serious, thoughtful and meant to improve the paper. Only once did I receive a referee report where a personal grudge was obvious. Needless to say that this report was highly discounted in my decision and we had to get a third referee report.

When I took over the Journal, one of my key goals was to introduce a short paper category. The 2018 STM Report (‘An Overview of Scientific and Scholarly Publishing’) has documented a decline in the time spend by researchers reading articles. Along this line, more and more Journals offer shorter articles such as research notes or letters. Examples are the AER Insights, Review of Economics and Statistics or the Scottish Journal of Political Economy all starting to publish shorter articles alongside ‘full’ articles.

We started publishing these shorter papers and, in particular, I edited a Special Issue on ‘Agriculture in New Zealand and the Pacific: Challenges and Opportunities’, which was entirely made up of short papers. I think I can say that this concept has been very successful in reaching readers. Of the most downloaded articles in the last year, 9 out of 10 are short papers and the difference in the number of downloads is large: the regular article on this list has 439 downloads while the most downloaded short paper has 1615. Yes, there is a need for full articles which present extensive results, but there is equally the need for short papers which communicate in a different way with the reader.

One somewhat sad insight into being the editor of NZEP is observing that studies using New Zealand data are submitted, and subsequently published, in top journals and not in the NZEP. Journals publishing papers using New Zealand data include, for example the American Economic Review (Coibion, Gorodnichenko, & Kumar, 2018), Quarterly Journal of Economics (Coibion, Gorodnichenko, Kumar, & Ryngaert, 2021), Econometrica (Kumar, Gorodnichenko, & Coibion, 2023), Review of Economics and Statistics (Chu & Cuffe, 2024; Kumar & Wesselbaum, 2024; Sin, Stillman, & Fabling, 2022), Journal of Urban Economics (Greenaway-McGrevy & Phillips, 2023), Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (Noy & Sin, 2021), Social Science and Medicine (Thom & Grimes, 2022), Ecological Economics (Knook, Dorner, & Stahlmann-Brown, 2022) or Climatic Change (Storey, Owen, Zammit, & Noy, 2024). This documents the quality of research conducted here in New Zealand (and there are more examples I could have cited) but also the competitive environment the journal operates in and the hegemony of US-based journals when it comes to the rewards of publishing.

I think being an editor has made me a better referee. When I receive referee requests, I now submit them within a week and clearly communicate to the author and the editor what I like and what I don’t like about the paper.

Being an editor has made be a better author (I think). I learned from the great papers, and I learned from the not-so-great papers that were submitted to NZEP. It has made me more critical of my writing and the way I present results. In particular, as an early career economist I certainly underestimated the importance of the abstract. The first thing I see as an editor is the title, the author list and the abstract. Whether I like it or not, I am already starting to form an opinion at this point. Having published more and more in journals outside economics, I have started to use structured abstracts even when submitting to econ journals: Background, methods, findings and conclusion. I also spend even more time on the introduction and the conclusion of my papers. Finally, I think most economists, including myself, can learn from colleagues in other disciplines about how to communicate and present research findings – maybe regression tables are not the most entertaining or clear way to present findings after all.

Allow me to conclude with some final thoughts about the future of the journal, maybe publishing in general. First, open access will be the future. Unless your employer has a publishing agreement, the article processing charge (APC) can be very high. This could exclude some researchers from submitting to journals, which would be a concern. Second, the rise of AI creates some concerns about the meaning of the word ‘author’ and could actually increase the burden of reviewing.

Overall, while being an editor has challenges (you do need a thick skin), it was a pleasure to read so many terrific papers and get to read about topics I otherwise wouldn’t have.