Publishing Economics: How Slow? Why Slow? Is Slow Productive? Fixing Slow?

Aboozar Hadavand, Daniel Hamermesh and Wesley Wilson

No 29147, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Publishing in economics proceeds much more slowly on average than in the natural sciences, and more slowly than in other social sciences and finance. It is even relatively slower at the extremes. We demonstrate that much of the lag, especially at the extremes, arises from authors’ dilatory behavior in revising their work. The marginal product of an additional round of re-submission at the top economics journals is productive of additional subsequent citations; but conditional on re-submission, journals taking more time is not productive, and authors spending more time is associated with reduced scholarly impact. We offer several proposals to speed up the publication process. These include no-revisions policies; limits on authors’ time revising articles, and limits on editors waiting for dilatory referees.

JEL-codes: A11 B31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-isf
Note: LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Aboozar Hadavand & Daniel S. Hamermesh & Wesley W. Wilson, 2024. "Publishing Economics: How Slow? Why Slow? Is Slow Productive? How to Fix Slow?," Journal of Economic Literature, vol 62(1), pages 269-293.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29147.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Publishing Economics: How Slow? Why Slow? Is Slow Productive? Fixing Slow? (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29147

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29147

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).