Improving Peer Review in Economics: Stocktaking and Proposals

Peer review is central to the lives of researchers. We conduct a survey on improving peer review to which we received responses from over 1,400 economists. The survey is the bedrock of this article, which was written to (i) document the current state of peer review and (ii) investigate concrete steps towards improving it. We offer a snapshot of the recent submission and peer review activity of respondents, detail the difficulties they report facing, and measure their attitudes about various challenges and possible proposals to address them. We hope that this report will provide fertile ground for the development and implementation of practical solutions for improving peer review in economics.