“Please forgive the long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
― Blaise Pascal
When preparing a manuscript for submission to a top economics journal, word count can be a problem if you haven’t written specifically for that journal. For example, a job market paper or a PhD thesis chapter needs to undergo a metamorphosis before it becomes journal ready.
How do you shorten an economics manuscript so you don’t alter its content or your odds of a smooth review?
Reducing manuscript size doesn’t require an editor’s professional skills or experience, so it’s something you can do yourself. It does, however, require time, patience, and motivation. But with some tips, reducing the length of an economics manuscript gets easier.
Following these steps should help you reduce word count so your economics paper meets the submission requirements of your target journal.
Step 1: Understand the guidelines of the journal
What is the page limit for the journal? Top economics journals usually have submission guidelines that specify the word count or page length of the manuscripts they accept. Here are a few examples of page limits on economics articles:
- No more than 45 pages or 17000 words excluding the online appendix (maximum 25 pages) is what Econometrica requires. Longer manuscripts may be accepted if preapproved by the journal.
- The American Economic Review wants papers that are no longer than 40 pages, excluding the appendix, which should be of “a reasonable length”. The standard page length in the industry is 250 words, so 40 pages means 10000 words.
- Small Business Economics submissions should be less than 8000 words, without the online appendix.
If you know that for your target journal, manuscript length is not set in stone, contact the journal editor first. Don’t waste the journal staff’s time—and your time—submitting manuscripts that don’t follow all the publication’s guidelines.
Make sure you understand what counts and what doesn’t count toward the limit. Usually everything apart from the online appendix counts. However, the online appendix is not a dumpster, so it needs to remain of a decent length. What “decent” means varies from journal to journal.
If your target journal has no paper length guidelines available online, contact its editor to be sure that the journal imposes no limit on article length.
Once you know how many words, or how many pages, you need to cut from your manuscript so you play by the book, it’s time to make the hard decisions.
Step 2: Aim at reducing manuscript length without sacrificing content
Just like when you’re pruning roses, when you’re pruning an economics paper, you should focus on what to keep—rather than on what to delete—to avoid cutting too much.
Of course, you need to keep everything that’s essential. Once you’ve identified what you cannot cut, move everything else to the online appendix for now.
While you’re trying to decide what moves where, keep your goal in mind: communicate your results effectively and concisely. You’re not trying to impress the reader, editor, or referee with your knowledge.
At this point you should know what should stay and what should go. The relevant and essential material should form the main text. Move the relevant yet not essential material to the online appendix (a section you can ignore for now).
Step 3: Cut
Start with the main text and go through each section of the main text to find opportunities to reduce its length. If you haven’t already done so, review the latest issues of the journal to see how
- they’re organized,
- the sections are titled,
- image captions are formulated, and
- figures are designed (how legends, notes, and symbols are used).
Before you actually start cutting words and visuals from your paper, have a clear idea of what it should look like so it fits the journal.
The following are some ways to reduce word count that I use when editing economics manuscripts:
- Get rid of cheap talk. Delete any sentence that doesn’t add value, whether it repeats information already presented or diverges from the topic.
- Shuffle visuals. Delete or move to the online appendix any table or figure that’s unnecessary to the story of your economics paper. Get help from co-authors or advisors to decide what’s essential and what’s just nice to have.
- Eliminate surplus. Eliminate unnecessary repetitions (and I cannot say that enough). This is the problem of most economics manuscripts I’ve edited. For example, if you find yourself using the phrase “in other words”, you’re not concise enough. Revise the previous sentence so you can delete the one that starts with “in other words”.
- Aim for economy of language. Examples of words to cut from a manuscript are “due to the fact” (replace with “because”); “as can be seen in Figure 1” (instead, use “Figure 1” in parentheses or “Figure 1 shows”); or “Figure 2 graphically illustrates the representation” (just “Figure 2 represents” is enough).
- Prune all empty phrases. Examples include “it should be noted that”, “it is worth noticing”, “it is worth mentioning”, and “recall that, as mentioned above”. They’re just filler text.
- Illustrate the text. Figures save you many words, so look for all opportunities to replace text with images and you’ll save entire paragraphs.
- Achieve scarcity of captions. Figures captions don’t need to be very long if you use visual symbols effectively. If you don’t know how to create figures for manuscripts, get help. Shortening figure captions is irrelevant when you’re trying to reduce manuscript length only if you have only a couple of figures. But let’s say you have 12 figures; if you shorten each caption by 20 words, you’ve saved one page.
- Revisit the conclusion section. Is it concise enough? It shouldn’t duplicate your results or discussion section.
- Minimize the theory. (Citations are your friend.) If another author has described what you need to describe, cite their work and skip the description.
- Make a rational choice of citations. (Citations can be your enemy.) The works you cite increase the total word count of your manuscript, because both in-text citations and the list of references count towards paper length. Depending on the reference format, you may need to cite the first three or even five authors—and these words add up. So, while being generous with crediting others’ work, be very selective with the papers you reference. Each citation should be directly linked to the story of your paper. But as this is a minor way to reduce manuscript length, I wouldn’t prioritize it.
- Use descriptive titles. Unless it’s a requirement of the journal, avoid ending the introduction with a summary of the following sections. If you give the sections a descriptive title, you won’t need a whole paragraph starting with “The next section presents the methodology” and ending with “the last section concludes the paper.” You could save about 100 words.
- Revisit the introduction. As it’s the part journal editors and reviewers read first, the introduction of your economics paper should be concise and engaging to read. Look for opportunities to improve the language and you’ll also improve concision.
Once you’re satisfied with your slimmed-down manuscript, start trimming the online appendix following the same steps as for the main text.
How do you know your economics manuscript is journal ready?
The economics papers that are journal ready are those that are as short and to the point as possible, while following the journal’s guidelines for authors.
You don’t need to be Mark Twain to realize that turning a long paper into a shorter one is harder than it sounds. So, when writing your next paper, be cheap with your words and use the minimum necessary to convey what you need to. It also helps to write specifically for a journal so you know your word limit from the start.
If you need help preparing an economics manuscript for publication, consider contacting a freelance English editor for all questions related to language. They’ll edit your manuscript for concision—and might even suggest other ways to reduce the length of your academic manuscript that you haven’t considered.
Related articles:
- Publishing economics papers: Advice from experts
- 13 Signs you’re wasting the reader’s time and how a freelance editor can help
- Academic editing tips for research scientists
Last revised on 27 February 2024
