How to Write an Effective Referee Report and Improve the Scientific Review Process

What is it about?

The review process for academic journals in economics and other fields has become much more elaborate over time. Journals insist on more revisions, and papers have become bloated by demands for robustness checks and extensions. Revisions often improve papers, but often at disproportionate cost--direct and indirect. To gain insight into the reviewing process, we wrote to a sample of former editors of leading economics and finance journals (the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics), and asked them for their thoughts about what might improve the process. This highlighted systematic, correctable mistakes made by reviewers for top journals, which we illustrate using quotations from these editors, which are consistent with our own experiences as well. Our purpose is to highlight these mistakes and provide a road-map for writing an excellent review.

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Why is it important?

The scientific review process is crucial for the advance of knowledge. The procedural flaws we identify cause misallocation of scholarly time, and, we argue, can act to suppress relatively innovative papers especially.

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