Editorial Report 2015

The 4 issues of De Economist published in 2015 contain 19 papers of which 15 papers were published in regular issues and 4 papers were published in a special issue with guest editor Bas ter Weel on unemployment in the Great Recession and beyond.

The evolution of the impact factor of De Economist is presented in the Fig. 1. As shown, after fluctuating from 0.1 to 0.3 in the period 2001–2008, the impact factor to 1.02 in 2013 to drop to 0.58 in 2014. The Article Influence Score shows a similar development with a peak of 0.57 in 2013 and a value of 0.45 in 2014.

Fig. 1

Evolution of impact factor and Article Influence Score; 2001–2014

The Table 1 provides information about the editorial process. In 2015 there were 60 regular submissions which is a substantial increase as compared to earlier years. However of these submissions so far only 9 were accepted, 43 were rejected, and 8 are still in the editorial process. Of the rejected papers 35 were desk-rejections, i.e. rejected within a week after submission. Excluding the papers which were desk-rejected there were 25 regular submissions which is about the same as earlier years. Of the papers excluding desk rejections the acceptance rate in 2014 was 45 %. In 2015 this was 36 %, but there are still 8 papers in the editorial process so the 2015 acceptance rate might go up in the course of 2016.

Table 1 Results of the editorial process

Finally, the table shows the relationship between year of submission and year of publication. For example, of the 15 papers submitted and accepted for publication in 2015, 9 were published in 2015 while the remaining 6 will be published in 2015.

Since 2011 the editors allow authors to include in the submission editorial letters and referee reports from failed submissions at other journals. This does not mean that no other referees will be used, but the use of previous information will speed of our editorial process.

The editorial board welcomes Bas ter Weel as new editor as of the 1st of January 2016. The editors of De Economist would like to thank the following reviewers for their contribution to the editorial process in 2015:

Yvonne Adema	Jan Jacobs	Jan Potters
Bernard van den Berg	Eelke de Jong	Ward Romp
Michiel Bijlsma	Adriaan Kalwij	Bert Scholtens
Hans Bloemen	Pierre Koning	Bert Schoonbeek
Lans Bovenberg	Peter Kooreman	Arthur van Soest
Rob Euwals	Boris van Leeuwen	Adriaan Soetevent
Didier Fouarge	Jochen Mierau	Bas Straathof
Philip Hans Franses	Asako Ohinata	Vincent Vandenberghe
Joop Hartog	Franz Palm	Jeroen van de Ven
Marco Hoeberichts	Thomas Post	Aico van Vuuren