For Reviewers

Refereeing Process Guidelines

Central European Economic Journal (CEEJ) is dedicated to fair, fast, and professional double-blind peer review. We make every effort to ensure that the review process runs in a timely manner. CEEJ tries to offer their authors timely advice on how to make the manuscripts as useful for prospective readers as possible. Successful submissions combine state-of-the-art theories with convincing empirical verification. Therefore, we expect that a referee report indicates what theory (or theories) the author relies on. It would be of particular importance to see an expert opinion on whether the theory (theories) applied in the paper are referred to adequately, and whether the references are relevant without a doubt. In particular, we are grateful if the referees confirm that what the author sees as the value added of his/her paper indeed addresses a salient issue that has not been analysed in the literature so far. CEEJ acknowledges the fact that there may be contributions where a novel idea or a concept is so important and striking that empirical material is of secondary importance. However, a more likely case is that the idea is not revolutionary, but the paper verifies a known concept against some new empirical data. In this case, the referees are expected to determine whether the verification replicates something that can be found in the literature, or perhaps new interesting aspects are discovered. Most papers end with a concluding section. The author summarizes what he/she did and what his/her suppositions imply for economic theory and economic policy. The referees are expected to discuss whether the conclusions are justified by the theory and empirical material applied or, perhaps, even more, general statements could be attempted. To structure comments reported by reviewers, CEEJ provides a review form, in which reviewers refer to the aims and contribution of the research, the literature sources used, the applied theory, research design and methods, and the results obtained. General comments are also necessary in order to judge whether the paper can be published. On top of that many reviewers detect arithmetic mistakes, strange abbreviations (obvious to some specialists only), unclear definitions, etc. Such technical comments are also very valuable, both for the author and the editors of CEEJ.