LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE EDITORS

• Date: 01 March 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jfir.12050
• Published date: 01 March 2015

LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE EDITORS

This serves as an update to the Letter from the Executive Editors that we published in the

Spring 2014 issue of the journal. That letter addressed the problems that we (and other

finance journal editors) were facing from authors submitting papers that simply were not

ready for the rigorous review process. Perhaps the authors of these papers believed that a

reviewer would help them develop and edit the paper in hopes of making it better and

getting it published. This practice imposes unwarranted and substantial costs on the

review process. Further, this resulted in our desk rejecting a substantial portion of papers

submitted to the journal, meaning these papers did not go through the full review process.

As we explainedthen, each of us reads every submission to the journal.We do this

to ensure thatpapers sent on to our Associate Editors and/orother reviewers are of sufficient

quality to warrant their valuable time and effort. Importantly, we desk reject a submission

only if there is a strongconsensus to do so among the three of us. Our assessments are based

broadly upon the paper’s potential contribution to the literature, the appropriateness of the

topic, and the quality of the writing, hypothesis development, data, and methodology.

We noted last year that we had desk rejected 62% of all submissions received

between January 1, 2012 and November 8, 2013, and that this percentage was only

slightly higher than prior editorial teams of the JFR.

In order to mitigate this problem, we made two changes in our submission

policies and procedures at the beginning of 2014. First, we increased our submission fee to

be more comparable with peer journals. Second, we discontinued the policy of

reimbursing a portion of the submission fee for papers that were desk rejected.

Our hope in adopting these changes was to reduce thenumber of papers that were

submitted “too early”or that were not of sufficient quality to warrant reviewers’time and

effort. We are pleased to report that this policy change seems to have accomplished its

desired outcome. The likelihood of a submission moving to the full review process has

indeed increasedover the last year. In particular, our desk reject rate in 2014was lowered to

41%. And while it is too early to tell for certain, it would appear that our acceptance rate is

likely to increase. At this writing,we have accepted 6.6% of all papers received in calendar

year 2014, and 12.5% of the papers received in 2014 are stillin process. We also note that

we have worked through the inevitablebacklog of accepted papers that new editorial teams

face, and have substantially reduced the time accepted papers wait in the queue.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our many Associate Editors and

reviewers who have been instrumental in seeing that we continue to publish high-quality

finance research in the Journal of Financial Research. Finally, we also thank the Southern

Finance Association, the Southwestern Finance Association, and the JFR policy board for

entrusting us with continued stewardship of the journal.

Scott Hein, Robert C. Brown Chair in Finance

Jeff Mercer, I. Wylie and Elizabeth Briscoe Chair in Finance

Drew Winters, Lucille and Raymond Pickering Chair in Finance

Rawls College of Business

Texas Tech University

The Journal of Financial Research Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 Page 1 Spring 2015

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© 2015 The Southern Finance Association and the Southwestern Finance Association

RAWLS COLLEGE OF BUSINESS, TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY

PUBLISHED FOR THE SOUTHERN AND SOUTHWESTERN

FINANCE ASSOCIATIONS BY WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING