It is sometimes said in academic circles that you’re not a proper researcher until you’ve got your first rejection letter from Nature or Science. But does it really make sense to submit your paper to the most highly cited journals and work your way down?

Martin Heintzelman and Diego Nocetti, two economists at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, aimed to find out. Their latest paper in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy is entitled “Where Should we Submit our Manuscript?”

“The journal submission process is a controversial and stressful part of academia. There are many dimensions of uncertainty, and bad decisions could greatly delay publication of important results and harm one’s career,” they write.

They constructed models of increasing complexity, starting with just the journal’s characteristics (fees, time taken to decide) and the impatience of the author and moving on to include factors such as the quality of the manuscript, flaws in the reviewing process and how impatient authors are to get their work published in economics journals.

Applying mathematics to this question proves common sense correct: “This paper provides new evidence that, on the whole, the advice supplied to young faculty members by veterans of academia is correct. Authors largely have an incentive to submit to the best journals and then subsequently, work their way down a schedule of journals.”

However, there is an exception to this: “particularly impatient or risk-averse” researchers should begin their submission ordeal further down the chain.

Finally, Heintzelman and Nocetti discuss the implications of their work for journals themselves. They conclude that the best thing for journals to do would be to review papers faster and charge higher submission fees. This would reduce the impact of time lags on impatient authors and reduce the number of lower-quality paper submissions trying their luck with an imperfect reviewing system.