Observations on assignment 3 - Reviews
General observations
 Good effort overall! Some even at a level of good professional
reviews in wording and substance, but big variation
 Your rejection rate is 16,7%!!! ….far below average even for low
tier journals…
 “no substantial contribution” “theory missing and method
wrong”, “objectives unclear and methodology faulty” or “does
not fit to journal” cannot result in invited revision
 however if your arguments are clear, then the editor is helped a
lot independent of your recommendation
 Sometimes the reports do not give any clear recommendation on
what should be changed but still call it major revision
 “Publish with major changes” as recommendation does not make
sense
 You are generally fine with respect to the tone of the review …
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Thomas Heckelei
Publishing and Writing in Agricultural Economics
Observations on assignment 3 - Reviews
General observations – continued
 Always provide comments in clearly distinguishable
bullets (specific comments) or with numbering (general
comments)  will help the authors with targeted response
 Try to be as concrete as possible on what is the problem
(“the link between theory and application is weak”….is a
very weak and not helpful comment
 Don’t go through my bullets on potential issues
mechanically and list many things that are fine….point
out and assess the contribution and then only problems
 If you have more than 10 general comments, then your
general comments are not general enough....
 “Rejection in its current form” is confusing if not
invitation to submit a revision comes with it
 Clearly, the substance of the reviews improves with own
knowledge of literature. Identification of contribution not
possible without it
Thomas Heckelei
Publishing and Writing in Agricultural Economics
2
Observations on assignment 3 - Reviews
Observations on “General comments”
 Always identify the stated and/or perceived contribution
(not only say “there is one” or “ there is none”)
 “Paper adds to the literature” is not sufficient. You need to
say what and how large the contribution is relative to
what has been published
 Assess value of this contribution or potential contribution
after changes  relevant for inviting revision or not
 General types of contribution:
 New theory, generalisation/extension of existing theories
 New methodology, generalisation/extension/combination of
existing methodologies which is better suited to test theory or use
information provided by data
 New application with respect to data used (more recent, new
region, more representative for testing hypotheses….)
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Thomas Heckelei
Publishing and Writing in Agricultural Economics
Observations on assignment 3 - Reviews
Observations on “General comments”
 Providing just “further empirical evidence” on a topic is
generally not sufficient for a top journal in the field 
rejection if the specific value of that empirical evidence is
not given (new area, contrasting results, more substantial
dataset compare to before….)
 A short paragraph first summarizing the referee’s own
understanding of what the paper does is useful (done by
majority but not all)
 A comment on “missing theory”: some types of articles
need very little explicit theory in text (e.g. application of
established modelling systems)
 Formalities not an issue for general comments unless the
format is so bad that it inhibits the understanding of the
whole paper
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Thomas Heckelei
Publishing and Writing in Agricultural Economics
Observations on assignment 3 - Reviews
Observations on “specific comments”
 It is ok if not everything presented in Tables and Figures
is discussed in the text (but Tables and Figures should be
mentioned somewhere in the text as a whole and they
should serve a specific purpose in the paper)
 Conclusions drawn not from own analysis and robustness
of the model not demonstrated (if questionable) is worth a
“general comment”
 Be specific in your “specific comments”! Are paragraphs
and sentences (tables and figures) logical, clear, relevant,
in the right order…don’t be afraid of being “wrong”;
identify exactly the location (section, paragraph, equation
number or lines) of the parts your comment relates to
 Statements like “some conclusions are not related to the
research” don’t help. Identify which and why. More
similar formulations found….
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Thomas Heckelei
Publishing and Writing in Agricultural Economics