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 While most manuscripts will ultimately not be published at the Journal, it is important that the referee and editorial evaluation provide the author with useful feedback on his/her manuscript.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
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.
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.
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.
We request that you group your comments under the headings “Essential” and “Optional”, or at a minimum make it clear in your report which of your comments would be “Essential” and which you consider to be “Optional”. If we decide to ask for a revision, the authors would be told that not addressing the “Optional” comments will not be grounds for rejecting the paper and we would also ask you not to recommend rejection based on this.
Elsevier and our journal has an explicit policy for the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the review stage. Please review this policy fully. It prohibits, among other things, uploading papers you receive for review to an AI tool.
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. These belong in the letter to the editor.
Preparing the letter to the editor
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 Revise and Resubmit decision. After a Revise and Resubmit decision, in the second round the paper will either be accepted (subject to minor or major revisions) or rejected. This makes the first revision very important.
If you are recommending Reject, suggestions on which journal the authors should send their papers next are also useful.
Reports on revised manuscripts
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.
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 the 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.
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.