1 / 14

Refereeing and Discussant Guidelines

Refereeing and Discussant Guidelines. Susan Godlonton AGRODEP AIEN III Workshop Dakar, Senegal 4 th June, 2014. Referee Report. Components of a referee report: Cover letter Summary Key concerns Decision Report Overall view Main concerns Smaller concerns

halil
Download Presentation

Refereeing and Discussant Guidelines

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Refereeing and Discussant Guidelines Susan Godlonton AGRODEP AIEN III Workshop Dakar, Senegal 4th June, 2014

  2. Referee Report • Components of a referee report: • Cover letter • Summary • Key concerns • Decision • Report • Overall view • Main concerns • Smaller concerns • No “one-size-fits-all approach”

  3. Referee Report: Good paper? • What is a good paper? • Clear • Coherent (understandable) • Correct • Additional contribution • Value added of answer to question • Credibility of identification strategy • Validity and robustness of approach

  4. Referee Report: Overall view • Don’t repeat the abstract, the editor can read the abstract • How would you summarize the paper • What do you think is the key contribution • Do you think the authors address it correctly

  5. Referee Report: Main Concerns • Key issues that the author needs to address • Ensure that it is clear which of your concerns are fundamental • Don’t ask the author to write a different paper • Be constructive! Try to provide solutions where possible accounting for data limitations

  6. Referee Report: Main concerns • Related literature • Inappropriate to the actual material in the paper • Inaccurately described • Incomplete (very common) • Logical argument • Incorrect application of economic concepts • Inaccurate mathematical derivations • Loose ties between the economic model and the empirical analysis

  7. Referee Report: Main concerns • Econometric tools are being used inappropriately • Incorrectly used • Assumptions do not hold • Assumptions not defended with evidence • Estimated key coefficients of interest • Not properly identified • Not robust • Additional robustness checks needed • Interpretation of empirical results is inappropriate • Overstates the contribution • Overstates the claim (e.g. causation vs. correlation) • Conclusions are incorrectly made or expressed

  8. Referee Report: Main concerns • Econometric tools are being used inappropriately • Incorrectly used • Assumptions do not hold • Assumptions not defended with evidence • Estimated key coefficients of interest • Not properly identified • Not robust • Additional robustness checks needed • Interpretation of empirical results is inappropriate • Overstates the contribution • Overstates the claim (e.g. causation vs. correlation) • Conclusions are incorrectly made or expressed

  9. Referee Report: Minor concerns • Do not bring these up when discussing a paper • Specific places in text where discussion hard to follow or confusing • Not using standard notation • Spelling and grammatical errors • Missing data sources and poorly constructed Tables or Figures • References to the literature that are missing or incorrect

  10. Additional Resources • Refereeing • http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/how-much-to-referee-and-how-to-do-it • http://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/2012/01/contributing-to-public-goods-my-20-rules-for-refereeing/ • http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/10/how_to_be_a_goo.html • Discussant • http://chrisblattman.com/2010/02/22/the-discussants-art/ • Other resources will be uploaded to the AIEN workshop

  11. For today… • Each been assigned a paper/set of slides from one of your peers • Focus • Clearly define the research question • Define and discuss the identification strategy • Propose alternative credible identification strategy

  12. For today… • Focus on the identification strategy • What is the identifying variation? • What assumptions are made by using the chosen identification strategy (implicitly/explicitly)? • Do they make sense? • To what extent are these true? • How else can the author test the assumptions? • What robustness checks or placebo tests could the author run? • What would be a more preferable strategy?

  13. Thinking about Identification Homework Assignment

  14. Thinking about Identification Exercise • Group into: • Health • Education • Agriculture • Discuss proposed ideas, provide feedback to one another

More Related