Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

Instructions for Authors & Style Guide

Submissions

Manuscripts for Econ Journal Watch (EJW) should be submitted via email in Microsoft Word (.docx or .doc) or OpenDocument (.odt) format, double spaced. Tables or graphs should be included in the body of the document. Except in special circumstances, we require that statistical results published in EJW be accompanied by links to all data and code, to ensure replicability.

Style

Articles must conform to EJW style, which is based on the Chicago Manual of Style (14th edition). Articles do not have to be in that style when submitted, but after an article is accepted, the author is expected to make the appropriate changes. Authors are encouraged to use a down-to-earth style that does not compromise scholarliness. (For guidance on writing, we recommend Deirdre McCloskey’s book Economical Writing.)

Editorial Process

Compared with typical academic journals, even other online journals, the editorial process of EJW is very swift and interactive. Editors often work directly with authors by phone or email. Submissions will be actively edited for style and expression. In these respects, the EJW editorial process is like that of a carefully edited magazine, but without any sacrifice of scholarliness.

General Organization

  • All submissions should include an abstract of up to 200 words, plus a list of keywords.
  • Parenthetic documentation should be used for citations, with a complete reference list including all cited work at the end of the article. Citations should be (author year) when referring to a complete work, e.g. (Friedman 1962), or (author year, page number) when referring to a specific point, e.g. (Keynes 1936, 172). Citations of multiple works should be set off by a semicolon, e.g. (Schelling 1978; 1984). Complete page numbers for book chapters and academic articles should be included in the Reference list.
  • Footnotes should not be used for citations. Substantive footnotes should be included at the bottom of the page denoted by Arabic numerals.
  • Long quotations of more than three lines of text should be indented, single spaced, and separated from the rest of the text by an additional line.
  • Abbreviations should be used sparingly and only after identifying the complete name once (followed by the abbreviation in parentheses).
  • Numbers, letters, or Roman numerals should not be used to divide sections. Major sections should be divided by a bold title in all caps centered on the page. When a major section is divided into at least two subsections, subsections should be identified by a title in bold at the left side of the page. For example:

EXPECTATIONS

Adaptive Expectations

(text)

Rational Expectations

(text)

References

Specific examples of EJW reference style follow.

Books

Keynes, John Maynard. 1920. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe.

Publication date should appear, without parentheses, following the author. Book titles should be italicized.

Smith, Adam. 1976 [1790]. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reprinted books should include the year of reprint first, and then the original year of publication in brackets.

Journal Articles

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review 35(4): 519-530.

Article titles should appear without quotation marks. 35 is the volume and (4) is the Number. Complete page numbers for the article should follow the colon.

Book Chapters

Fogel, Robert W., and Stanley L. Engerman. 1995 [1977]. Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the American South. In Historical Perspectives on the American Economy, ed. Robert Whaples and Dianne C. Betts, 226-256. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Please include the page numbers for the entire article (they are 226-256 in the example here).

Working Papers and Self-Published Papers

Krugman, Paul, and Robert Lawrence. 1993. Trade, Jobs, and Wages. NBER Working Paper 4478. National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Mass.). Link

Kremer, Michael, and Eric Maskin. 2003. Globalization and Inequality. Working paper. Link

For working papers with a publisher, the city and state are placed inside parentheses and they follow rather than precede the publisher name. Also, particularly for working papers it is important to provide a link to the paper.

Blog Posts, Newspaper and Magazine Articles

Heckman, James J. 2013. Interview by Dylan Matthews. Wonkblog, Washington Post, February 14. Link

Becker, Gary S. 2004. A 19-Year Dialogue on the Power of Incentives. BusinessWeek, July 11: p. 28. Link

Provide links to material when possible. For material appearing both in print and online, please try to provide page numbers as well.

Legal Cases

Legal cases are cited in the text like other sources, but the full citation appears at the end of the article under a special section: Cases Cited, which follows References.

In the text:

(U.S. v. Hooker 1994, 1039)

The case name is italicized and the page number follows the year.

At the end of the article under Cases Cited:

United States v. Hooker Chemical & Plastics Corp., 850 F.Supp. 993 (W.D.N.Y, 1994).