Journals, editors, referees, and authors: experiences at the Journal of Economic Literature.(Column)

I have been invited to write about my experiences as editor of the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) and to reflect on what these experiences may mean for the status of journals in intellectual inquiry. I was editor of the JEL for thirteen years from 1986 to 1998. Before becoming editor, for four years, I served as Associate Editor under the editorial supervision of Moses Abramovitz. After stepping down as Editor, I was a member of the Board of Editors of the JEL until 2006. Therefore, I was associated with the administration of the Journal for almost 25 years--from 1982 to 2006.

What I write here focuses on my years as editor. However, as Associate Editor, I learned a great deal from Moe Abramovitz and I am indebted to him for the model he provided me of a conscientious and active journal editor. In effect, my years as an Associate Editor were something of an apprenticeship to an eminent and honorable scholar and I benefitted greatly from the training and education I received from Moe.

The JEL Survey Articles

First and foremost, I must write that the Editorship of the JEL was largely a labor of love. No doubt, I worked hard at the position. I took a deep personal interest in the well-being of the journal and invested much effort in it. However, this was not selfless. There were substantial private returns. Although my Department at Stanford had kindly assigned me to teach a graduate microeconomic theory class, I felt my knowledge of Economics was becoming increasingly specialised. I knew more and more about a narrower scope of Economics. The editorship of the JEL represented an opportunity to counter this professional imperative towards specialisation. As editor of JEL, I invited articles on topics that I knew little about and that I wanted to become much better informed of. Of course, this required a prior investment in reading about these topics so I could identify the appropriate people to approach and perhaps to write these articles. In this, my Board of Editors was often very helpful in proposing particular people or in guiding me away from unsuitable writers. The Board consisted of economists whom I had selected and whom the AENs Executive Committee approved. The members of the Board had different specialties and they shared with me the goal of publishing articles that informed non-specialist economists about important research in particular fields of Economics.

I would approach a potential author and declare my interest in an accessible survey paper directed to non-specialist economists. I encouraged the likely author to sketch an outline of the paper he or she would deliver. I asked that the paper not be organized around names and particular papers as if it were a string of abstracts pieced together such as "X (1980) claimed this, Y (1984) argued that, and Z(1989) responded in this way". This is tedious to read, if not to write. I asked for a selective and synthetic review of a major research effort in which a necessary ingredient would be the evaluation of this research endeavour: what have been the successes and the failures in this line of research?; how much confidence can be placed in the literature's findings?; what do we think we know and what do we believe we do not know?; and where should future research efforts be directed? This element of evaluation ought to be of value to the specialists. Here is an opportunity to step back from the research frontier and to take stock of a significant intellectual enterprise and to pass judgment on it. In this way, a successful JEL article would speak both to the specialist and to the non-specialist economist.

Because the paper was designed for the non-specialist, if it were appropriate, I would not hesitate to scrawl across the page of a submitted draft "I don't follow this". For a paper in Labor Economics, my area of expertise, I would be more likely to scrawl, "This won't be understood by the non-specialist". No doubt, this insistence on a paper that was accessible to the non-specialist and, as a consequence, the many drafts that some papers went through to satisfy my requests for expository clarity did not endear me to certain authors, some of whom gave up and took their work product elsewhere. However, I believe that, in most cases and for those papers that were ultimately published in the JEL, this concern with expository clarity enhanced the paper's readership and influence. I have always believed that exposition matters, even in the most technical of articles, and it is surely no coincidence that the discipline's unquestioned intellectual giants of the past fifty years or so have been very effective expositors.

One quality lauded in the academic community is the ability to analyse arguments and propositions in a detached and dispassionate manner. However, it is an unusual author of a manuscript who shows the necessary detachment and disinterest in his own paper. I have found that, at the stage of floating arguments and testing chains of thought in discussion, scholars are often quite disinterested and detached. But once the scholar puts down these ...