Revising and Resubmitting...

Sorry, I haven't posted much recently... I'm in Sweden, working with Astrid Kander, so far we've only been working on this paper we are trying to revise and resubmit. It's for the top journal in economic history and so we are really working hard on it. We'll put up a working paper soon when it is ready. In the middle of all that I just saw this blogpost on the processing of trying to get articles published. Seems this guy tries to hit all the top journals in political science each time with only limited success. Some of my papers have gone to about four journals before getting a revise and resubmit but mostly they get published in the first or second one we try. The paper I am working on was rejected from a good general interest economics journal first. But that only took a day :) Desk rejection is common in economics now which maybe is speeding the process up a little. Doesn't seem like polisci has caught onto that yet. But if you are working in environmental and resource economics and one general interest journal rejects your paper it's probably not productive to send it to more, I think?

Other interesting points in the article - importance of avoiding sloppiness - a lot of effort needs to go into polishing articles and revising and resubmitting if you want to get published in good journals. I think a lot of beginning researchers underestimate the effort involved in that. Also that researchers are often surprised by which of their articles get into good journals and how many citations they get. This is somewhat true. When I do research and write a paper I am always thinking it is going to be a good one. I think though that at the submission stage it can be clear that a paper is not the greatest. But sometimes I have been surprised that some of my papers got few citations, while others got a lot.