Journal Publication
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Journal of Financial Economics
Editor: Toni Whited
Top 3 advice to junior faculty:
- Junior faculty is not so good at positioning their papers. They do great literature
reviews, but not how their paper adds.
- Junior faculty often do not have as polished papers, they are not rewritten 20 times.
- Junior faculty is hesitant to sent stuff out, they sit on things for years and years,
and then they get one rejection and get discouraged. You have to go on and on, and not
give up, and take reviewer comments super seriously. Everyone gets rejected all the
time!
A paper is ready to send in for publishing when you do not get more comments on it. If
you are not invited to give a lot of seminars, then send your paper out for comments. I
also leave a paper alone for a few months, because you need to get some perspective, and
you often change things when you pick it up again. Do this once or twice. Rewrite the
papers, five or six times.
What makes a paper a good fit for the JFE:
- Anything that is finance, structural or reduced form, anything!
Importance of introduction
There is a limited referee pool and the referees have limited time. You got to catch the
editors attention so they can give it to good referees. Toni reads the introductions
from start to end, look at the methodology section, and some tables. If she doesn’t know
the topic she asks for advice. JFE gets around 1800 papers per year, and the editor
reads around 3 papers per day, so you really need to catch the editor’s attention.
In the end what tips a paper towards rejection is the quality of the ideas. Did you
explain to the editor why anyone besides you and the referees should be interested in
the paper? This can tip a paper one way or the other. If a paper has some executional
issues, but has convinced everyone that it is interesting, we let them fix the issues.
However, if a paper is perfectly executed but you have not convinced the editor then it
typically tips the other way. The introduction is very important here, you should
rewrite the introduction 5 to 6 times.
Cover letter to editor
- You should write a cover letter to the editor.
- Relatively short, including: This is my paper, this is my coauthors, this is the
topic, and this topic is awesome because.
Journal of Finance
Editor: Stefan Nagel
Advice for junior scholars:
- Recognizing that writing matters. We need to interpret the results we have and we need
to persuade an audience.
- The introduction is crucial! Especially the first 2 pages. Don’t write in a
chronological order of how you got to your results. What is the most logical, clearest,
and transparent way you can explain to the audience why I’m doing is important.
- Look at and deconstruct really good papers.
- You want to highlight the parts of the paper that is the most novel in the
introduction!
- It is very important that the introduction reflect the paper. For example if you have
an empirical paper with a support theory section and you give off the impression in
the introduction that it’s a theory paper, the editor will send the paper to theory
referees.
- If your topic is not mainstream, the author should expect scepticism from referees and
therefore try to do a really good job in the paper explaining why the topic is
important.
- If you are working on a new issue, try to collaborate with them! Send them your paper,
maybe organize a conference. You can send “cold emails” to folks, however there is no
guarantee that they will answer.
If you get an R and R what are some common mistakes people do not to get published:
Review of Financial Studies
Executive Editor: Itay Goldstein. RFS have 7 co-editors that get assigned editors.
- You never know for sure when a paper is ready for submission, but you should avoid
submitting a paper too early. Junior authors might be more prone to this. You need to
get feedback before sending it in, and ideally presenting in seminars and conferences.
When the feedback in converging then you know it is more or less ready.
- You can inform the editor about competing papers, you can write to the editor that you
don’t want them to review your paper. But don’t over do it, not all related papers are
competing with yours.
- You can request an editor when submitting to RFS.
- RFS has double submissions, a paper can be rejected once and then submitted again.