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5 I have been invited to write about my experiences as editor of the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) and to reflect on what these experiences may mean for the status of journals in intellectual inquiry. I was editor of the JEL for thirteen years from 1986 to 1998. Before becoming editor, for four years, I served as associate editor under the editorial supervision of Moses Abramovitz. After stepping down as editor, I was a member of the board of editors of the JEL until 2006. Therefore, I was associated with the administration of the Journal for almost twenty-five years— from 1982 to 2006. What I write here focuses on my years as editor. However, as associate editor, I learned a great deal from Moe Abramovitz, and I am indebted to him for the model he provided me of a conscientious and active journal editor. In effect, my years as an associate editor were something of an apprenticeship to an eminent and honorable scholar, and I benefitted greatly from the training and education I received from Moe. The JEL Survey Articles First and foremost, I must write that the editorship of the JEL was largely a labor of love. No doubt, I worked hard at the position. I took a deep personal interest in the well-being of the journal and invested much effort in it. However, this was not selfless. There were substantial private returns. Although my department at Stanford had kindly assigned me to teach a graduate microeconomic theory class, I felt that my knowledge of economics was becoming increasingly specialized. I knew more and more about a narrower scope of economics. The editorship of the JEL represented an opportunity to counter this professional imperative toward specialization. As editor of JEL, I invited articles on topics that I knew little about and that I wanted to become much better informed Journals, Editors, Referees, and Authors: Experiences at the Journal of Economic Literature John Pencavel 84 John Pencavel of. This required a prior investment in reading about these topics so I could identify the appropriate people to approach and perhaps to write these articles. My board of editors was often very helpful in proposing particular people or in guiding me away from unsuitable writers. The board consisted of economists whom I had selected and who were approved by the American Economic Association’s executive. The members of the board had different specialties, and they shared with me the goal of publishing articles that informed nonspecialist economists about important research in particular fields of economics. I would approach a potential author and declare my interest in an accessible survey paper directed to nonspecialist economists. I encouraged the likely author to sketch an outline of the paper that he or she would deliver. I asked that the paper not be organized around names and particular papers as if it were a string of abstracts pieced together, such as “X (1980) claimed this, Y (1984) argued that, and Z (1989) responded in this way.” This is tedious to read, if not to write. I asked for a selective and synthetic review of a major research effort in which a necessary ingredient would be the evaluation of this research endeavor: What have been the successes and the failures in this line of research? How much confidence can be placed in the literature’s findings? What do we think we know, and what do we believe we do not know? Where should future research efforts be directed? This element of evaluation ought to be of value to the specialists. Here was an opportunity to step back from the research frontier, take stock of a significant intellectual enterprise, and pass judgment on it. In this way, a successful JEL article would speak both to the specialist and nonspecialist economists. Because the paper was designed for the nonspecialist, if it were appropriate , I did not hesitate to scrawl across the page of a submitted draft, “I don’t follow this.” For a paper in labor economics, my area of expertise , I would be more likely to scrawl, “This won’t be understood by the nonspecialist.” This insistence on a paper that was accessible to the nonspecialist and the many drafts that some papers went through to satisfy my requests for expository clarity did not endear me to certain authors, some of whom gave up and took their work product elsewhere. However, in most cases and for those papers that were ultimately published in the JEL...

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