Editorial Policies

Submission Guidelines and Policies

  • Submission guidelines and requirements can be found here. To submit, go here.
  • Style guidelines for accepted papers can be found here.
  • The code sharing policy can be found here and FAQ here.

Conflict of Interest Disclosure Policy

Instructions for providing a conflict of interest disclosure statement can be found here.

Referee Guidelines for the Journal of Finance

General guidelines on preparing JF referee reports can be found here.

Additional resource: Preparing a Referee Report: Guidelines and Perspectives by Jonathan B. Berk, Campbell R. Harvey, and David Hirshleifer was presented to the Board of Directors of the American Finance Association and received its support in January 2015.

Editorial Review Policy for the Journal of Finance

The Editorial Review Policy can be found here.

Editorial Ethics Guidelines for the Journal of Finance

The AFA Board of Directors has approved the following Editorial Ethics Guidelines.

Disclosure statements of the editors and associate editors of the JF are available here.

Joint Statement by the Editors of the JF, RFS, and the Incoming Editor of the JFE Concerning Referee Confidentiality

 A recent paper by the current editor of the Journal of Financial Economics posted on SSRN on December 15, 2020 revealed paper acceptance rates by individual referees at the JFE.

The editors of the JF, RFS, and the incoming editor of the JFE hereby affirm our commitment to never publicly disclose data that could reveal individual referees’ confidential recommendations, or any other confidential information about the editorial process. 

The editors of the JF, RFS, and the incoming editor of the JFE further believe that editors are bound by the AFA Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics, sections 6.(d)(5) and 6.(f), as well as the rules for human subjects research, to not publicly disclose such confidential information.

Itay Goldstein, Executive Editor, Review of Financial Studies
Stefan Nagel, Executive Editor, Journal of Finance
Toni Whited, Co-Editor and Incoming Executive Editor, Journal of Financial Economics

Editors’ Joint Policy Statement Regarding “Coercive Citations”

Journal of Finance
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis
Journal of Financial Economics
Review of Asset Pricing Studies
Review of Corporate Finance Studies
Review of Financial Studies

A recent article published in the journal Science presents evidence that some editors across different business disciplines have engaged in coercive practices with regard to citations. The authors define coercive citations as requests that give no indication the manuscript is lacking in attribution but instead simply guide authors to add citations to the editor’s journal. They suggest that such practices are motivated by intent to increase measured journal impact factors.

The editors of JF, JFQA, JFE, RAPS, RCFS, and RFS hereby affirm that it has been, and will continue to be, our policy to avoid coercive citation practices. While we retain professional discretion to suggest that authors cite particular papers, we will do so only when scientifically appropriate, and without regard to the journal where the cited paper is published.