Last week, I tried out a new way of “ranking” economics journals, based on the percent of 2018-2019 authors who have also published in one of the top 5 economics journals anytime since 2000. This week, I decided to take a look at finance journals (political science is next in line, as well as some extensions and robustness checks for econ journals).
The top 3 finance journals are generally agreed to be Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. How do other finance journals stack up against them according to this metric? For fun and fairness, I threw in the top 5 econ journals into the mix, as well as Management Science.
Here are the “top 10” journals according to this metric (not counting the reference top 3, of course). The first numerical column gives the percent of authors that published in the journal specified in the row in 2018-2019 who have also published an article in any of the top 3 finance journals at some point since 2000. The next three columns give journal-specific percentages.
Because this is not my field, I have less to say about the reasonableness of this ranking, but perhaps finance readers can comment on whether this lines up with their perception of quality. Compared to the econ rankings, the raw percentage differences between journals appear larger, at least at the very top. And the overall frequency of publishing in the top 3 is lower. Management Science makes the top 5, but the top econ journals do not ( JPE and ReStud do make the top 10). To me, this makes sense, since it’s pretty clear that this ranking picks up connectedness as well as quality. Anecdotally, finance departments seem to value Management Science and the top 5 econ journals no more and perhaps less than the top 3 finance journals.
Here are the rest of the journals I ranked (as before, if a journal is not on the list, it doesn’t mean it’s ranked lower, it means I didn’t rank it). Here, we can clearly see that not many people who publish in JF, JFE, and RFS publish in AER, QJE, or Econometrica.
If there’s another journal you’d like to see ranked in reference to the top 3 finance ones, please comment!
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!
We are taught a lot of research skills in grad school. But a
lot of these are specific technical skills. Little attention is devoted to the
question of how to be a productive
researcher. This “meta-skill” is usually learned the hard way through trial
and error or, in the best-case scenario, through others’ advice. Here are my
two cents on what works.
Treat the research process as a skill you have to learn and maintain. No one is born knowing how to take a project from an idea to a published paper; some people just figure it out more quickly than others. And the more you practice, the easier it gets. Having the right attitude about this process can help you calibrate expectations and muster willingness to persevere.
Protect your research time. Figure out when you work best (e.g., mornings or evenings) and minimize other commitments during those times. In my calendar, 8am-11am is marked as “research time” every single weekday. That reminds me not to schedule other things during that time. To avoid having to respond to requests with “I’m sorry, that time doesn’t work for me, I’ll be sitting in my office doing research,” I will often take the first step in suggesting an afternoon meeting time. This doesn’t always work – for example, I taught 9:30-11am Tue/Thu last semester and some morning meetings are unavoidable – but it greatly improves my productivity overall. Remember, the fact that your plan to do research at a particular time does not involve another person does not mean that it is not a “real” commitment. In fact, your job (mostly) depends on it.
Invest in your writing skills. Writing used to be difficult, and I would dread it. Nevertheless, I persevered and now writing is much easier and more enjoyable. Here are some specific suggestions.
Make an effort to write every day, during the time when your brain and body are at their best. For me, this is the morning.
Allow yourself to write “s&*^ty first drafts.” Do not try to spit out the perfect word/sentence/paragraph on the first try. Write freely, edit later.
Do not start out trying to write for hours at a time. If you are not used to writing regularly, aim for 30 minutes or even just 10 minutes. If you write for 10 minutes a day, that is almost an hour of writing per week. If you do 30 minutes a day, that adds up to 2.5 hours! The Pomodoro technique can be very helpful here.
Join a writing group. For about two years, I did Academic Writing Club, an online group where professors or grad students from related disciplines are joined by a “coach”, create weekly goals for themselves, and check in daily with their progress. It is not free, but in my opinion worth it (and you can probably use your research budget). If you are looking for a free writing group, look for people around your university who are willing to get together and write!
Prioritize projects based on how close they are to publication. (Obviously your coauthors’ preferences and constraints matter here, so this is a general guideline). Specifically, this should be the order of your priorities, if not on a daily, then at least on a weekly level:
Proofs of accepted papers that need to be turned around to the publisher. [When I first heard this suggestion, my reaction was, “I don’t have any proofs!” If that is the case, don’t worry, you will get there.]
Revise-and-resubmits.
Working papers that are closest to submission, whether these are brand new ones or rejected ones looking for a new home.
Projects that are closest to becoming working papers (e.g., ones where the analysis is complete).
Projects where you are analyzing the data (working with a model, if you’re a theorist).
Projects that are newer than everything above.
Try to avoid being the bottleneck. If someone is waiting for you to do something on a project before she or he can work on it, try to prioritize that task. Obviously, one reason for this is that your coauthors may be annoyed if you take too long to do something you promised to do. But another (possibly more important) reason is that by not being the bottleneck, you can boost your annual productivity by having your coauthors (or research assistants) do their work faster.
Following the publication of the post on where to submit your paper, someone asked, “How do you know when it’s time to give up on a paper?”
This is a really hard question. We put a lot of work into
our papers (I’m assuming in this post that it is a completed paper) and,
despite the theoretical wisdom of “Ignore sunk costs”, it’s difficult to let go
of months or years of hard work no matter how bleak things look. But there’s
also no magic number of rejections beyond which it’s clear that you should just
give up. Here are my two cents on how to make the decision.
First, here’s a clever trick I use to make “giving up” on a paper easier psychologically – I have never permanently given up on a paper. But I do have four papers and a lot of never-made-it-to-paper-stage-projects “on the back burner”. I haven’t worked on them for years and don’t plan on doing so unless I have nothing better to do. In other words, instead of asking the hard question of “Should I never try to publish this paper again?”, ask the easier question of “Should I prioritize other projects over this paper for now?” I always have the option to pull papers out of the “back burner” folder, but lo and behold, I keep having better projects to work on and don’t think much about the archived ones.
Of course, that still leaves the question of “Should I prioritize other projects over this paper?” open. I’ll discuss three related cases where this question becomes relevant and offer some general guidance for how to decide.
#1 Your paper has gotten rejected multiple (let’s say at least five) times for roughly the same reason, you don’t think you can do anything to address that shortcoming, and you have other, more promising, projects/ideas. If that reason is “this paper isn’t making enough of a contribution” AND you’ve revised your introduction substantially in between submissions to make the best possible case for your contribution, this may be a sign that it’s time to drop down a tier (though see some discussion below on when this is a good idea). At the same time, the contribution of a paper is hugely subjective. If the only thing reviewers find wrong with your paper is the contribution, then trying another journal within the same tier is fairly low-cost, assuming your contribution is actually within the realm of what gets published by the tier of journals you’ve been submitting to. Here, talking senior colleagues is especially helpful.
If the reason your paper keeps getting rejected is something related to the paper’s data/methodology – for example, no one believes your instrument, no matter how many robustness or placebo tests you’ve added – then dropping down a tier is also an option, but is less likely to be a successful strategy. I came close to giving up on a paper because no one seemed to like the IV. I ultimately decided to keep trying though because (a) a lot of the rejections were desk rejections, allowing me to re-submit without revising (since there was no real feedback given) and (b) I believed in the instrument myself and thought we made a good case for it. After six rejections, the paper was published.
By contrast, if your paper is getting rejected for diverse reasons, it is probably good to keep trying (though in that case I would recommend taking a close look at the writing to make sure your exposition is clear).
#2 You feel that your paper would only be publishable if you dropped to a tier of journals where your current colleagues generally don’t publish, you have other, more promising, projects/ideas. (Presumably, you think you need to drop down a tier because of numerous rejections. Otherwise, perhaps you are underestimating your paper!) For better or worse, publishing in a journal that your department really looks down on is sometimes viewed as a negative. So, if you otherwise have a good chance of getting tenure at your department (and want to get tenure at your department), you may want to put the project down and move on to something else. Two of my archived papers were archived for this reason.
#3 It looks like the path to publication in an acceptable-tier journal would be painful and you have other, more promising, projects/ideas. Maybe your case is not as extreme as the two cases above: you’ve had 3-4 rejections, you feel like you may have a shot at an acceptable but not stellar journal tier but, given the feedback you’ve gotten so far, you have a gut feeling that it would be painful for various reasons. Maybe a ref said the paper is not well-written and after taking a close look, you realize that the ref is right and that the whole paper needs an overhaul (I speak from experience). Maybe you have your own misgivings about the methodology/data and feel like an overhaul there is warranted. If you have other great projects in the pipeline with a lower cost-benefit ratio, by all means feel free to prioritize them. No one said you have to publish every paper you write.
Yes, I put “you have other, more promising, projects/ideas” in every entry on purpose. If you don’t have any other projects or ideas that have a reasonable shot at publishing at the same tier or higher than what you’ve been submitting to, then keep working on publishing the paper, even if it means a major overhaul. Use the suggestions I wrote about in a previous post on what to do after a rejection. While you wait for reviews, work on new projects and ideas and if a better one comes along and your submission gets rejected, by all means abandon the project.
A final word of caution is in order. According to my scientifically constructed chart below, our level of excitement about a project is always highest at the idea stage, when the promise seems unlimited and the pitfalls and barriers to getting there are not salient. So, if you find yourself constantly putting completed papers on the back burner and picking up new shiny ideas, stop! Go back to your best completed paper and publish it (and work on the shiny new ideas while you wait for reviews). Then repeat until you have a few publications.
