The review process in economics: is it too fast?

• Author: Azar, Ofer H.

1. Introduction

   The academic publishing process is an extremely important topic because it affects the productivity of scholars in producing and disseminating new knowledge, and yet it has received relatively little attention in the academic literature. Research about the academic review process is an important tool to making more informed decisions about how we should shape this process. Such research, for example, may allow us to make better decisions in issues such as the publication delay, submission fees, and single- versus double-blind review. Although some studies on the process of academic research have been written and even published in top journals, (1) the research in this area is scant compared to its importance.

   The long time it takes an article from its first submission to a journal to its publication is one of the main criticisms of the academic review process in certain disciplines. Especially upset about this long delay are untenured faculty, who need to publish several articles in a few years in order to get tenure. The first-response time (the time from submission of the manuscript to receipt of the initial editorial decision about it; henceforth denoted FRT) is a particularly important part of the delay; as opposed to the time it takes to revise the paper or the time from acceptance to publication, the FRT delays all manuscripts submitted, not only the few whose authors are asked to revise and resubmit or the few that are accepted. Consequently, the average paper is delayed by the FRT several times (about three to six times according to Azar 2004).

   The long FRT in economics journals (often three to six months) seems unnecessary. After all, referees usually do not need more than a few hours to read a paper and write a report on it; neither do editors need much time to make a decision once they obtain the referees' reports. The short FRTs in leading journals in finance and accounting (often one to two months) suggest that shorter FRTs are possible. Indeed, editors of many economics journals try to reduce the FRT in their journals, their motivation often being either to benefit the profession or to attract more submissions. Whatever the editors' motivation is, most people believe that these efforts are welfare increasing. This article suggests that this common belief is not necessarily correct.

   The article argues that the current FRT may be below optimal, so that efforts to reduce it are counterproductive, even though I claim that reducing the FRT will not harm the quality of the review process. The reason that reducing the FRT may be harmful is that it will increase the number of submissions of low-quality papers to top journals, thus increasing the workload of referees and editors without any significant benefit in terms of the quality of research published. Moreover, the increased number of submissions will raise the rejection rate, and each paper will be rejected more times on average before it is published, so the total time from initial submission to publication may not decrease at all.

2. Are the Efforts to Reduce the First-Response Time Beneficial?

   The aspect of the review process that receives maybe the most criticism in economics is the long FRT. (2) Authors, especially untenured ones, are upset that it takes several months to receive a decision about the submitted manuscript. After all, the refereeing task takes only a few hours. Hamermesh (1994), for example, suggests that it takes six hours to referee an average paper. The Canadian Journal of Economics provides advice to referees in which it states "The amount of time taken with a paper can vary enormously--anything from a couple of hours to a couple of days of full-time effort. A typical report should probably take 3 or 4 hours." (3)

   If it takes only a few hours to referee a paper, why does it take several months to get an editorial decision? The main reason is that it takes the referees a long time to return their reports, usually not because they need a lot of time to ponder about the paper but because papers wait a long time to be read. This may be the result of the referee having higher-priority tasks, of procrastination, and maybe of fear that prompt response will result in additional refereeing assignments too soon.

   The delay caused by the refereeing process makes the dissemination of research slower, and this is particularly important because new research builds on previous work, so any delay causes the entire chain of research to be delayed. Moreover, when it takes a long time from writing an article to its publication, this reduces the chances that a policy-oriented article will be published in time to be relevant, deterring economists from writing such papers (Borts 1981). These costs of the delay brought several economists to suggest ways to reduce the delay (Hamermesh 1994; Pressman 1994; Szenberg 1994). Editors often express their desire to shorten the review time (Ellison 2002a). (4) Their reason, however, is often to attract authors rather than the profession's welfare (Stulz 2000).

   Are the efforts made by editors and others to shorten the FRT beneficial from a social point of view? Most scholars think that the answer is positive, as this enables faster dissemination of knowledge. The few who think otherwise usually argue that shortening the delay will reduce the quality of the review because referees will have less time to prepare their reports. This argument, however, is hard to reconcile with the fact that most of the delay is caused when the manuscript just waits to be read. (5)

   What I argue, however, is that even if shortening the FRT has no effect on the review quality, it might not be optimal to shorten it (obviously, if one believes that shortening the FRT reduces review quality, this makes my claim even stronger). The reason is rooted in the special structure of costs and benefits in the academic profession. Basically, the idea is that the private monetary cost to submit an existing manuscript to another journal is negligible compared to the private benefits from a publication in a good journal. This cost is also much smaller than the social cost of the review process. As a result, if the FRT is very short, authors have an incentive to submit their manuscript to many more journals than a social planner would like them to. Authors do not internalize the costs that they impose on editors and referees when they submit a paper. The FRT is an additional submission cost from the author's perspective, and it therefore increases the private costs of submission, reducing the number of submissions and alleviating the workload on editors and referees. As a result, given the current low submission fees in economics, shortening the editorial delay without taking measures to prevent excessive submissions may in fact reduce social welfare. (6) The following sections elaborate on these ideas.

3. Why Does a Lower First-Response Time Lead to More Submissions?

   To show why a lower FRT leads to more submissions, I present a simple model about how the optimal submission strategy is determined. The optimal submission strategy is a very complicated problem to solve...