Instructions for Preparing Articles for Publication

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This page describes the instructions for preparing papers for publication in Quantitative Economics.
View the instructions for submitting papers to  Quantitative Economics.
View the current editorial procedures and policies of  Quantitative Economics.
 

1. Publication process
 

When a paper is accepted, the Coeditor notifies the Director of Publications. The Director of Publications will coordinate the final steps of the files from the authors.

Copyright: Authors will be sent instructions by the Director of Publications upon acceptance.

Quantitative Economics is an Open Access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution.

Authors who publish in Quantitative Economics will release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This license allows anyone to copy and distribute the article for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given. For details of the rights authors grant users of their work, see the "human-readable summary" of the license, with a link to the full license. (Note that "you" refers to a user, not an author, in the summary.) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in Quantitative Economics. Authors must post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.

Submitting final versions: Please note that in order to avoid delays in publication, in case there are extensive changes after acceptance authors should bring these to the attention of the coeditor who handled the manuscript, together with a brief explanation of the changes, before sending the final version to the managing editor.

The final version of accepted papers, prepared as described in Essentials of manuscript preparation for publication below (including all graphics files for figures, files for tables if separate from the manuscript files, and files for any supplementary material to be posted on the web), should be sent to the managing editor by email as both .pdf files and complete electronic source files attachments (latex files are preferred, but any word processing files can be used). If the manuscript contains figures, also send the graphics files (.eps or .jpg files are preferred). If there is a supplement to the paper that the editor has accepted for publication on the Society’s web site, then authors should consult the information on preparing Supplementary Material for publication.

References cited in all published papers must be published, available in a stable public archive (like SSRN), or provided by the authors of the manuscript at the time of final publication. (Editors may grant exceptions to this policy.)

Copyediting: When all requested materials have been supplied, the manuscript is prepared and copyedited for typesetting according to Quantitative Economics style. (Many aspects of our style are described in Quantitative Economics Style and Formatting Policies below, for author’s information. The submitted manuscript need not be prepared according to these specifications which are implemented by the copyeditor and typesetter.) Grammar and spelling are corrected and reference citations are checked. If minor ambiguities are noted, a query is addressed to the author on the front of the manuscript, so the matter may be addressed when proofs are corrected.

Author checking of proofs: After the paper is typeset, the author is notified by e-mail how to download the page proofs and the copyedited manuscript, and is instructed on how and where to send corrections and offprint orders. The author should take special note of any queries on the front of the manuscript, the instructions for checking references, the deadlines for return of proofs and offprint order, and the different places to which these items should be returned, as set out in the instructions for obtaining the proofs. Proofs will contain a list of hyperlinks from the article, and a list of bibliographic references obtained automatically (that will be used for hyperlinking the references). Both of these should also be checked with care, and compared with the actual references provided by the author. Return proofs as soon as possible; the issue to which a paper is finally assigned depends in part on the date corrected proofs are received from the author(s). Authors who want to make significant changes to the proofs that are not typesetting errors may be asked to pay the cost.

Final typesetting: When the Managing Editor receives the corrected proofs, all author and printer corrections are compiled on a single set of proofs. Following a thorough review for any additional errors, the corrected proofs are returned to the typesetter for final correction.

Publication Fees: A publication fee is currently set at 50% the cost of production per page. Specifically, accepted papers will incur a fixed per page fee for any typeset material, including any approved supplemental appendices. The publication fee will be collected after final proofs but before publication and invoiced at the then-prevailing rate. Any paper submitted before September 1, 2020, will be exempt from the publication fee. Authors of accepted papers residing in countries classified as either low-income or lower-middle income by the World Bank may request an exemption from the publication fee. The list of those countries can be found here under the headings LOW-INCOME ECONOMIES and LOWER-MIDDLE INCOME ECONOMIES

Retractions: The Society has the right to retract a published paper in the event of (i) a breach of warranties stated in the copyright form, (ii) any substantive errors, or (iii) evidence of scientific misconduct or other fraudulent actions. A committee of the three journal Editors and current sitting President for the Society will be formed to evaluate and decide the proposed retraction. More information concerning retraction guidelines of the Committee of Publication Ethics can be found here.
 

2. Essentials of manuscript preparation for publication

Enumeration and cross referencing

Enumerate and label equations, tables, definitions, etc., clearly and without redundancies to facilitate finding cross references.

Only number equations to which there is a subsequent reference.

Use Arabic numerals to number equations and figures, roman numerals for tables.

To minimize confusion between references to different enumerations, try to use non Arabic numerals for enumerations other than equations and tables, e.g., use lower case Roman numerals in parentheses ((i), (ii), etc.).

In general use simple alphanumeric references (Proposition 2, Table IV, equation (5), part (iii) of the proof, property (b) etc.). Do not use location references (“graphed in the figure after theorem 1). Try to avoid using references that are not completely transparent (e.g., “the above condition is called condition M…see condition M,” “as in the table describing the domestic data,” or “the main theorem shows”).

Online pdfs of papers will include links to cross references within the paper if these are provided by the author (e.g, by internal cross referencing in TeX), or obvious (see above).

Mathematical, statistical and formal writing

In formal definitions indicate which term is being defined by italicizing only that term.

In reporting estimation results (whether in an equation or a table), parenthetical expressions presented below estimates should contain standard errors rather than t ratios. If t ratios are used you will be asked to supply standard errors.

Please do not use asterisks or bold face to denote statistical significance. We encourage authors to report standard errors and coverage sets or confidence intervals.

General

Avoid unnecessary hyphenation; many hyphenated words can be treated as one or two words.

Avoid starting a sentence with lower case mathematical symbols or equation numbers.

Appendices should be given a content heading, especially if there is more than one appendix (e.g., Appendix A: Proof of Proposition 1).

Certified Random Order: Econometric Society journals do not permit the use of \textcircled{r} to indicate that authors have been selected according to certified random order. Authors are free to indicate their relative contributions and the methods that they used to determine author order in a footnote. Citations to articles in the text and references will strive to respect the designation of authors and author order used by those articles.

References

Only include in the reference list entries for which there are text citations, and make sure all citations are included in the reference list. References in text should be cited by author (date), author (date, p. xx), or author (date, Proposition 3), etc. References in the bibliography should be complete, including the first and last names, and date of publication. References to books should include place of publication and publisher. Articles in edited books should include editors and pages. Unpublished manuscripts and thesis should include locations. Electronic (only) journals and unpublished materials should specify the URL at the end of the reference.

Supplementary material should be cited as below. Do not abbreviate any titles.

See the following illustrations:

Aumann, Robert J. (1987): Correlated Equilibrium as an Expression of Bayesian Rationality, Econometrica, 55, 1-18.

Peck, James (1994): Competition in Transactions Mechanisms: The Emergence of Competition, Unpublished Manuscript, Ohio State University.

Enelow, James, and Melvin Hinich, eds. (1990): Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Wittman, Donald (1990): Spatial Strategies when Candidates Have Policy Preferences, in Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting, ed. by M. Hinich and J. Enelow. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 66-98.

Cahuc, Pierre, Fabien Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Marc Robin (2006): “Wage Bargaining with On-the-Job Search: Theory and Evidence, Supplementary material: Extensions” Econometrica Supplementary Material, 74.

Figures and tables

Electronic files (.jpg or .eps preferred) of all illustrations (no matter how simple) must be provided by the author. Include all labels and keys appearing within the figures and on the axes. The figures may be in color as the journal publishes in online only format (starting with its January 2024 issue).

 

3. Preparing supplementary material
 

Title

The title of the Supplementary material should be as follows:
Supplement to "[title of the article]"

Description

Each file submitted should contain (or, if it is not a text file, be accompanied by) a brief abstract describing its contents. This serves the same purpose as the abstract of any paper. It can (and typically should) refer to the main paper and other files that are submitted. For instance the abstract can describe a submitted file instructions.pdf as containing instructions for using the two provided programs, a.exe and b.exe, that calculate the equilibria described in sections A and B of the main paper; the abstract for a.exe would then refer to instructions.pdf for instructions. If more than one file is provided, and if the abstracts cannot be written as above in a way that clearly describes their relationship, then there should be a text file that describes the complete set.

Submitting files

The files can be submitted either via the on-line submission form or exceptionally large sized replication files via e-mail to the Editor’s office. Large files should be compressed to .zip format.

File Formats

Supplementary material files should be submitted in the following formats:

Files that contain mostly text, such as information describing how experiments were run, information on subjects, descriptions of how data was processed or developed, proofs, extensions, consent forms, will be typeset and should be submitted in both .pdf format and source files such as .tex or .doc format (just like the main body of an accepted paper).

Tables, graphs, etc., should be provided both as source and .pdf files. If there are only few tables/graphs they will be typeset. Extensive tables and graphs are typically posted as provided in .pdf files and not typeset.

Data and programs, reference the Data Editor website with details on how to prepare replication packages for review by the DE office.  

Instructions to subjects, forms, and other material that seems useful to have in usable form should be provided in the format in which it was originally created. Material that is only available in hard copy can be scanned and submitted as .pdf files.

4. Quantitative Economics Style and Formatting Policies

A subset of our style standards are found here. As noted adhering to these is not required, but may simplify and minimize processing. Authors may retrieve a LaTex template from the journal's support page for LaTex here.