American Economic Review: Insights is a new journal by the American Economic Association. It’s intended to replace the short paper section of the AER, and the first issue will appear this summer. Naturally, I’ve had quite a few discussion with colleagues about its likely quality: will AER: Insights be a top-tier journal like the AER, somewhere in the middle of the pack, or a flop?
Obviously, many factors affect the success of a journal. But how it starts out surely matters. Publish some amazing articles and become the journal at the top of people’s minds when they think about where to submit, which will in turn make it easier to attract high-quality articles. Publish some questionable research, and risk aversion will kick in, prompting people to submit elsewhere first and leaving you mostly with articles that other journals decided against publishing.
So I again dove into the database of Academic Sequitur. We track forthcoming articles, so even though the first issue of AER: Insights has not been published yet, we have 26 to-be-published articles in our database (the first of which were added in November of 2018, by the way!). The question I asked was simple: what percent of authors whose work is scheduled to appear in AER: Insights have published a top 5 article any time since 2000?
The answer is a whopping 67% (61% if you exclude AER articles). 58% have published in the AER, 23% have published in Econometrica, 38% have published in QJE, and 39% have published in ReStud. The overall percentage is non-trivially higher than that of any other journal except for Journal of Economic Literature.
Perhaps these numbers are not surprising to you. In fact, it may very well be a strategy that AER: Insights is consciously employing to gain early traction. And these statistics could signal that it’s difficult to get published there unless you’re well-known, at least at this point (though we don’t know what the distribution of submissions looks like). But more information is better, and this certainly makes me more likely to try for AER: Insights in the future!