Dear Dr. Sloppytables,
Thank you for your recent submission to Review of Economic Theory of Consumer Habits (RETCH).
I skimmed the abstract and skipped right to the tables at the back of the paper. They are a mess.
Don't report regression coefficients as, say, 478102.302***. I couldn't give a damn about the third decimal point. Write it as 478,102 so I can read it easily.
I don't have time to go through your paper and figure out what the variable MaritalStat1 represents. Give the variable a clear, obvious, name such as "married". Don't bother reporting all 27 control variables; only report the ones that matter, put the others in a footnote to the table saying "Controls included but not reported...".
It would also be nice to know what the dependent variable actually is - because I don't read much except the abstract and the tables, they need to be completely self-explanatory.
Finally, do include a few goodness-of-fit stats. I don't really care much about your r-squared values, but if you don't tell me what they are, it makes me a little suspicious.
This isn't grad school. Nobody has to read your paper. If your tables aren't clear and easy to read, people won't bother to read them.
This isn't the 1960s, either. There are no secretaries any more. It's up to you to produce publication-quality tables. If you don't care about your research enough to do it, nobody else will.
Yours,
Frances Woolley
Co-editor, RETCH
p.s. If you're a STATA user, download estout and learn how to use it.
It would be great if we - editors and/or referees - could send a paper back tot he author(s) on this basis. Not necessarily an immediate reject, but a stand that in the current state the paper is not worth the time it would take a referee to sort out what is useful. Then again...maybe that would just serve to lower the quality of first submissions?
Posted by: Linda | February 23, 2012 at 01:24 PM
Linda, you're absolutely right, we need a new category, not "revise and resubmit" but rather "not yet submission ready." The editorial management software forces me to choose one of a limited number of options, and "not yet submission ready" isn't one of them. So I either have to reject the paper, which is a more negative signal than I wish to send, or give the author a revise and resubmit, which is a more positive signal than I wish to send.
Posted by: Frances Woolley | February 23, 2012 at 01:38 PM
you know QJE tables dont report R2.
I rarelly if ever report R2 in my papers and no one ask me too...
the rest I agree, except if the writter is a grad student... then you might want to be more lenient... maybe his advisor is not very good...
Posted by: john | February 23, 2012 at 02:46 PM
John - I agree with you about r-squared - but don't you think it's a good idea to report some kind of goodness-of-fit stats?
On leniency - these are only the letters I would like to write! The ones I actually write are much kinder and gentler.
Still, it's like their/there/they're. People have the difference between their/there/they're kindly and gently pointed out to them from grade 2 through to grad school. But they don't learn the difference because it doesn't really matter. In the real world, though, putting the wrong kind of their on a cover letter is enough to bump you off the short list. Remarkably, when it matters, people work out how to spell their, there and they're pretty fast.
Posted by: Frances Woolley | February 23, 2012 at 03:25 PM
Beautiful. For a journal I happen to serve on the editorial board of, we do a lot of "this is not ready for publication" rejects...fortunately, we don't have "editorial management software" that limits our ability to respond...
With respect to John's comment suggesting being a kindly, gentler editor if the author is a grad student, I think not. This is an adult activity here, and you get treated as an adult.
Posted by: Donald A. Coffin | February 23, 2012 at 03:27 PM
Strangely, I (not native speaker) do not have any problems with their/there/they're. But I do have a very tense relationship with then/than and lose/loose. There is just something wrong with these words. Having personal experience with how it feels like I am more sympathetic with poor Japanese struggling with r/l.
Posted by: J.V. Dubois | February 28, 2012 at 11:15 AM
J.V. - lose/loose get me too, as does chose/choose. I know just about every synonym for choose (pick, opt for, etc) - anything to avoid having to write choose on the blackboard. Economists need to be able to distinguish between complements and compliments, too. Remuneration/renumeration. Tariff is another hard to spell econ word.
Posted by: Frances Woolley | February 28, 2012 at 12:12 PM