Red Review Process

Review Process at RED (red-review-process)

When to trigger

• Setting expectations on timing and review model before or after submitting
• Understanding what the desk screen decides and what reaches referees
• Planning around the single-anonymized (not double-blind) model

How RED review works (verified)

• Desk / suitability screen first. The editor first assesses whether the paper is suitable for RED; papers that pass are sent out for review. A clean, in-scope, dynamic-model paper clears this faster.
• Single-anonymized review. Reviewers' identities are concealed from authors, but author identities are visible to reviewers — this is not double-blind, so you do not anonymize the manuscript.
• Minimum of two reviewers. Suitable papers go to at least two independent referees.
• Speed is a feature, not a guarantee. The current reviewer page asks reviewers to notify the editor if they cannot act within six weeks, and older SED newsletters report fast first-decision performance. Treat this as planning guidance, then confirm live expectations in the current author system.
• Coordinating Editor. Loukas Karabarbounis (University of Minnesota / Minneapolis Fed) is RED's Coordinating Editor (the editor-in-chief equivalent), cross-checked on SED and ScienceDirect pages.

Planning implications

• Single-anonymized means keep self-citations and acknowledgments natural — no double-blind scrubbing.
• The fast-turnaround target rewards a complete, runnable submission with replication discipline already in place; do not submit a paper whose code archive does not yet exist.
• Plan around a post-desk clock that starts only after the suitability screen and the fee.

Pre-review readiness

Before submission, stage the same materials you would need for a fast R&R:

• model equations and calibration table are internally consistent;
• code archive can rerun baseline and counterfactual exhibits;
• untargeted moments or accuracy diagnostics are available;
• the abstract names the dynamic mechanism and quantitative result;
• any proprietary data or large-runtime issue is documented.

Checklist

• Manuscript is not anonymized (single-anonymized model)
• Paper is in-scope and complete enough to clear the desk screen quickly
• Expectations set for ≥2 referees and live post-desk timing guidance
• Replication materials staged so a fast acceptance is not bottlenecked

Anti-patterns

• Double-blind-scrubbing a manuscript for a single-anonymized journal
• Treating an older turnaround statistic as a guaranteed current deadline
• Treating slow-journal habits (thin appendix, no code) as acceptable here

What fails the suitability screen

Patterns that plausibly stop a quantitative-macro paper at the desk (hedged — the screen is editor judgment, not a published rubric):

Round log

ROUND LOG — [paper short title]
  Submitted (fee received):  [date]   ← clock starts after fee + desk
  Desk decision:             [date]   suitable / not suitable
  Referee reports expected:  [live guidance / historical fast-review benchmark]
  Decision:                  [date]   reject / R&R / accept
  If R&R — archive rerun:    [date]   resubmission fee: exempt (2nd+ resubmission)

Keep this log in the project repository; it disciplines the team's expectations and gives a polite status query an objective trigger — confirm current expected turnaround against the journal's current author guidelines before quoting any figure to the editor.

Who referees at a SED journal

Expect referees drawn from the SED-conference community: people who solve heterogeneous-agent and business-cycle models themselves. Plan for reports that probe grids, Euler-equation accuracy, calibration circularity, and counterfactual logic rather than only framing — which is why the pre-review staging list above doubles as referee-proofing.

Supplementary resources

• red-submission — the pre-submission preflight
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — review-model and timing sources