eigenrobot

The emergence of "reject and resubmit" as a decision option for editors has been harmful to Economics, in my opinion, in particular for junior scholars. Why? The receipt of a "reject and resubmit" has, in my observation, all too frequently caused untenured faculty to spending enormous amounts of time and energy revising papers where eventual success was very unlikely. I am comfortable saying the creation of this option has not been research quality maximizing for individuals and by implication for the discipline. At best, these decisions reflect the intense pressure on junior scholars to publish in a "top 5" and so my claim is that this inefficiency is another indictment of the way top 5 publication affect Economics. Beyond this, I am unconvinced that the subjective expected value calculations of junior scholars have accurately reflected success likelihoods. (I certainly would have done poorly at them had I faced such choices before tenure.) Christopher Severan @ChrisSeveren raises an additional issue: by increasing the length of the revision process, changes in editor become more likely, a possibility whose probability is not known and I think not assessed in a decision to revise. Further, I believe that the option created an "out" for editors to avoid rejecting papers. It is no pleasure to reject an article, especially junior scholars, and my observation is that the option has allowed editors to avoid having to be decisive after a first round of decisions. As an editor, I tried to clearly distinguish between "warm" revise and resubmit decisions versus "tough minded" revise and resubmit decisions in order to make clear differences in likelihoods of success, but this was always predicated on a clearly feasible path to publication.

@ecree429 @eigenrobot it's his well-integrated anima

@DaBullStandard @politicalmath i feel he was entitled to do a jazz number