The role of reviewers

The Journal of Monetary Economics has a long tradition of providing authors with an excellent set of referees that go beyond advising the editors on their final decision, but crucially improve the quality of the research that gets published at the JME and elsewhere. The editors thank you in advance for the invaluable service that you will provide to the authors.

High quality and timely referee reports are essential to the performance of any journal. While most manuscripts will ultimately not be published at the Journal, it is important that the referee and editorial evaluation provide the author with useful feedback on his/her manuscript. The 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.

Preparing your report

  1. Write a brief summary of the paper at the start that describes the key substantive ideas that the author is trying to convey to the reader. 
  2. Make sure to highlight what is the marginal contribution of the paper, and whether you think that it is sufficiently important contribution to be published at the JME.
  3. If there are critical problems with the manuscript, such that the author's analysis is incorrect in some manner, state those right away and as clearly as possible.
  4. Distinguish between comments on major and minor issues. Major issues should be those that either seriously compromise the publishability of the manuscript or that require an extensive revision in the next round. Minor issues include comments that would help the presentation, clarify open questions, and may be followed or not in the next round. For both, be constructive.
  5. 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. 

Preparing the letter to the editor

  1. Include a recommended decision on the manuscript without regard to its area of inquiry. The JME decision categories are described in the authors pages. You should understand that in the first round except for very rare circumstances the paper will either be rejected or issued a Reject-Revise decision, which is equivalent to "Revise and Resubmit with no Commitment to Publish" in other journals. After a reject-revise decision, in the second round the paper will either be accepted (subject to minor or major revisions) or rejected. The JME does not allow for a second round of revisions without a commitment to publish. This makes the first revision very important. 
  2. If you are recommending Reject, suggestions on which journal the authors should send their papers next are also useful.

Submitting your report

  1. Your referee report should be submitted through EM.
  2. You will have received your USERNAME and a PASSWORD in the email that invited you to review the manuscript.  If you have forgotten your username or password (or both), the EM system can send them directly to you (it is not necessary to find the old email or to contact the editorial office).

Reports on revised manuscripts

  1. Aside from the new manuscript, authors are instructed to prepare a “response to editor comments” and “response to referee reports.” These should appear before the manuscript in the PDF you receive.
  2. The editor’s letter should have specified a clear set of revision instructions to the author, indicating the challenges that an author must overcome if his manuscript is to move to a conditional acceptance category. Your letter to the authors should include both a general appraisal of the revised paper and a set of specific comments structured around their response to the editor instructions.
  3. Your letter to the editor should include the following elements: (a) your overall recommended action -- which should be "reject," "accept with major revisions," or "accept with minor revisions -- on the manuscript, together with a brief explanation of this recommendation; (b) your assessment of the extent to which the author(s) of the revised manuscripts met the requirements laid out by the editor and fulfilled the recommendations of the referee. Please note that at this round, JME manuscripts are up or out. An "accept with major revisions" comes with a very high expectation that the manuscript will eventually be published.
Editors
Borağan Aruoba
Eric Swanson

Associate Editors
Klaus Adam
David Argente
Christiane Baumeister
Jaroslav Borovicka
Ryan Chahrour
Davide Debortoli
Luca Fornaro
Adam Guren
Kinda Hachem
Cosmin Ilut
Ethan Ilzetzki
Anton Korinek
André Kurmann
Zheng Liu
Frederic Malherbe
Leonardo Melosi
Andreas Mueller
Pablo Ottonello
Natalia Ramondo
Felipe Saffie
Benjamin Schoefer
​Eric Sims
Luminita Stevens
Johannes Wieland
Jonathan Wright
Fang Yang