Preparing to Submit an Economic History Paper

• John Vandivier

I'm now drafting an economic history paper, so in this article I will publicly repeat the process of finding 5-10 suitable journals and some model papers, but in this case with respect to economic history papers.

I recently had a paper rejected from Applied Economics, rank 126 as of the prior article, now rank 124. For feasibility's sake I am considering journals ranked lower than that. Searching for the word

  1. Explorations in Economic History, 201, 3-6 months, 11-20%, 17.
  2. Cliometrica, 339, 2-3 months, 33%, 11. This journal has a 26-30 page target.
  3. Economic History Review, 351, 3-6 months, 20%, 9.
  4. Business History Review, 518, 2-3 months, 11-20%, 7. Articles should not be more than 10,000 words in length, including footnotes.
  5. Business History, 1047, 3-6 months, 11-20%, 9. This journal has an 8000 word maximum, roughly 16 pages, which might make it easier to write for.

So those are the top 5. I skipped plenty of good ones including The Journal of Economic History, either because of unknown acceptance rates and return time or because several journals were oriented in Europe or overseas and my study is specific to the US. I will be pursuing these journals out of rank order, prioritizing by return time and acceptance rate instead. That is to say that Cliometrica is my first choice and Business History Review is my second choice. Business History takes shorter papers, so I may write a distinct paper and submit it there as well. I select a model paper from each of those three journals below:

  1. Cliometrica: Long-run stock returns: evidence from Belgium 1838–2010
    1. This paper does much with a relatively boring and public data set. I currently don't have a data set but I'm sure I could find a similar one and structure a paper this way.
  2. Business History Review: Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
    1. This paper hardly contains an ounce of data, and it seems to be for informational purposes rather than argument toward a thesis. If it can be published as a narrative-driven review, I think I can approach my topic in a similar way. It's also tangentially tech, as is my digital education topic.
  3. Business History: Theorising narrative in business history
    1. This paper describes a narrative approach to business history which I can use for my paper.

Here's the GitHub repository for the new paper in case you'd like to follow along. It should be on SSRN soon enough. The working title is New Digital Education as the Market Solution to the Student Debt Crisis.