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Instructions and Advice for Referees

High quality and timely referee reports are essential to the performance of any journal.
We wish to thank you in advance for the thought, time and energy that will be going into
the report that you are about to prepare.

Most referee reports must ultimately lead to a decision by a JME editor not to publish the
manuscript.  (Because of space constraints, at least 80% of submitted manuscripts cannot
not be published.)  At the same time, it is important that the referee and editorial
evaluation provide the author with useful feedback on his manuscript even if it is not to
be published in the JME.

The four week deadline for JME reports is a firm one.  If you know that you will not be
able to make it when you receive a review request, please decline the assignment.  If you
later learn that you will not be able to hit the deadline, please contact the editor that is
handling your manuscript, with a copy to Susan North at the editorial office
(north@simon.rochester.edu).

Preparing the report

In the discussion below, it is assumed that you are preparing a report on an initial
submission. Writing Reports on Resubmissions provides instructions and advice for
reports on second-round manuscripts.

A. The Audience

The starting point of any writing project is deciding on the audience.  For a JME report,
there are really three audience members: (a) the editor; (b) the author; and (c) yourself,
as an expert and a representative of the economics community.  In the discussion below,
we will make suggestions about how to provide the necessary information to each
member of the audience.

B. Reading the paper

Start by reading the paper quickly so as to get the key ideas. As you go, jot down a few
notes about what the authors are doing and the literature context of the paper. Then,
think for a while about the big picture -- what are the authors trying to do, are they
taking the best approach, and how successful are they at their approach -- and then jot
down some further notes about the paper and highlight any major concerns that you had
on this first reading.

Then, read the paper carefully, as if it were one written by a colleague or student.  As
you go through the paper, you should make notes on the following, perhaps on the
margins of the paper itself:

1. The key substantive ideas that the author is seeking to convey to the reader: (a) the
topics that are being studied, (b) the tools used; (c) the logical arguments made; (d)
the conclusions reached; and (e) the contribution to the literature that is being

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claimed by the author.

2. Central problem areas in the paper. For theoretical papers, these are places where
(a) the description of the topics is inappropriate to the actual material in the paper;
(b) the theoretical constructss are being used inappropriately; (c) the logical
argument is not tight, including incorrect application of economic concepts or
erroneous mathematical derivations; (d) the conclusions are incorrectly made or
expressed; and (e) the contribution to the literature is inaccurately described. For
empirical papers, these are places where (a) the description of the topics is
inappropriate to the actual material in the paper; (b) the econometric tools are
being used inappropriately; (c) there is only a loose link between the economic
model and the empirics; (d) the conclusions are incorrectly made or expressed; and
(e) the contribution to the literature is inaccurately described.

3. Smaller difficulties with the paper. For theoretical papers, these are (a) areas
where the author's line of thought is hard to follow; (b) spots with spelling and
grammatical problems; (c) areas where mathematical notation is inconsistently used
or excessively complicated; (d) references to the literature that are missing or
incorrect. For empirical papers, these are (a) areas where the author's line of
thought is hard to follow; (b) spots with spelling and grammatical problems; (c)
missing data sources and poorly constructed tables or figures; (d) references to the
literature that are missing or incorrect.

C. Summarizing the paper: Write a brief summary of the paper, at most one or two
pages.  In this summary, you have three objectives, one for each of the three audience
members.

1. The referee:  when you summarize the paper, without evaluation, write neutrally as
you might if you were recording information for yourself or for a member of a
research team that you were working in.  We do this task routinely in our work. It is
part of reviewing the literature for a research project that we may be undertaking
or a class that we may be preparing or a review article that we may be writing. The
key is that this part of your report is like notes that you would put in your files to
answer the question: "what did the author of this paper view himself as doing?".

2. The editor: your summary of the paper may well be the place that the editor starts
his review process, along with reading the introduction to the manuscript itself. 
You are providing thus providing the editor with an alternative introduction to and
summary of the paper.

3. The author: your summary of the paper is a way of establishing your credibility with
the author, who wants to know that you have carefully studied his paper. This takes
work on your part, but avoids unnecessary hard feelings if you must later be critical
of the work.  You are also providing the author with an alternative introduction to
and summary of his work.  We all know that it is sometimes hard to keep
perspective on where our work fits into a field, so that your summary may be very
useful to the author, even if your report is subsequently critical.  For both of these
purposes, credibility and information transfer, it is important to be careful with the
details of your presentation, just as you would if you were preparing your own

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manuscript for submission.

D. Evaluating the paper: The critical question to be answered in your report is "has this
manuscript made an important contribution to its chosen area?".  There are three aspects
of this evaluation that are worth stressing:

1. It is the author's responsibility to establish the fact that an important contribution

has been made. Many manuscripts are correct in their internal logic and novel
relative to the literature in some way, but do not themselves provide a contribution
that moves a research area forward in a sufficiently important manner that they are
publishable in JME.

2. If there are critical problems that you see with the manuscript in that the author's
analysis is incorrect in some manner, then it is important to state these problems
clearly in your evaluation.  It is also important to state whether you see an internal
inconsistency (a proof is wrong because there are contradictory elements) or an
incompleteness (a proof does not cover all claimed cases).

3. Your report should not include a recommendation about the decision category or
discuss whether the manuscript is appropriate for JME in terms of its chosen area.

E. Providing Feedback to the Author: it is important that the author benefit from the
hard work that you have put into reviewing the paper.  Depending on the nature and
status of the paper, this feedback might include:

1. Comments on areas where the logical argument in the paper was hard to follow,
important mathematical derivations were obscure, or empirical work was
incompletely described.

2. Comments on areas where the exposition was weak.

3. Reports on small problems organized by page.

After you have prepared these elements, assemble them into the referee report, using
the format below.

Referee Report
Journal of Monetary Economics, Manuscript Number
Manuscript title

A. Summary

B. Evaluation

C. Information for the author

1. Larger issues

2. Smaller Issues (by page)

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Preparing the letter to the editor

In your letter to the editor, you need to provide:

1. A recommended decision on the manuscript without regard to its area of inquiry. 

This recommendation should be based on an understanding that: (a) the Accept-
Revise decision category is appropriate for small revisions that the author can and
will almost certainly execute on the next revision, with only about 5% of JME
manuscripts falling into this category on the first round; and (b) the Reject-Revise
decision is appropriate for larger revisions that the author is likely to be able to
execute successfully, with a probability of moving to Accept-Revise of at least 50%
on the second round.
2. A statement of your view as to whether the JME is the appropriate placement of the
paper if you are recommending Accept-Revise or Reject-Revise.  In making this
statement, you should recognize that the editors view the JME as open to
submissions across a wide range of areas (see the introductory statement on the
website home page for further details) and that the author has chosen to submit the
manuscript to JME.  At the same time, there are clearly "readership clienteles" and
"literature clusters" within journals that at times mean that a submitted manuscript
is better placed at another journal.
3. Any other information that you think will be useful to the editor in preparing a
decision on the manuscript.
4. If your report is on time, an indication of whether you would prefer the $150
honorarium (delivered via check or Paypal) or the submission certificate (good for a
manuscript submission to JME within 12 months of your completed review,
substituting for the $250 fee that applies to all manuscript submissions).

Submitting your report

Your referee report should be submitted to the JME through
http://ees.elsevier.com/monec/
You will have received your USERNAME and a PASSWORD in the email that invited you to
review the manuscript. If you are a new user, you may want to refer to our tips for
referee use of the EES system or the tutorial on the EES website. If you have forgotten
your username or password (or both), the EES system can send them directly to you (it is
not necessary to find the old email or to contact the editorial office).
There are two options for submitting your report and editorial letter: you can enter
material directly (copying it from your wordprocessor, with the understanding that not all
characters will transfer) or you can submit documents as files.  For additional details
about the latter process, including instructions on how to remove information that may

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identify you as the referee, return to the main referee page.

Frequently asked questions

Q1: I am not sure what to recommend in terms of an editorial decision on a particular

paper. How should I make this call?
A1: It may be helpful to look at the chart below, which shows a decision tree for first
round and second round manuscripts at JME. Most manuscripts are going to be rejected
on the first round. In any event, the editor will ultimately make this part of the decision:
it is your responsibility to provide him with a clear and careful analysis of the paper.

Q2: If most manuscripts are going to be rejected, why should I spend my time writing
detailed reports that recommend how to revise the paper?
A2: Detailed referee reports are very important. For an editor to allow a “revise and
resubmit” decision, he must think that there is at least a 50% chance that a manuscript
will ultimately be published in JME. To decide whether the paper falls above or below
the critical level, it is necessary for him to a good bit of detailed information about what
form a revision might take. As an expert in this field, you are in a good position to
recommend a revision path.
Further, by providing the author with detailed revision advice, you are helping him figure
out how to best revise his paper for another journal, if it is rejected. Each year, the JME
receives many emails from authors that are grateful for the referee reports and editorial
feedback that they received on their rejected papers. Typically, authors say something
like “it was not good news that my paper was rejected, but I learned a lot about how to
make the paper better and, in that way, the submission to JME was very valuable to me
even though my revised paper will be sent elsewhere.”

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