Ail unintended ethnographyThere is a discipline in social sciences that claims to search and find the optimal solutions whenever there are scarce resources to fight over. [1] That discipline is and its claim for this capacity merged at some point hi the 20th century with another and even bolder one: to be able to make (correct) predictions about economic phenomena. After these two self-declared claims gradually gained some credibility within the larger social science community for various reasons, began to be recognized as a discipline that fixes normative problems without a normative stance, unlike other social science disciplines such as sociology, political science, or anthropology. This century-long PR campaign established economics' political and methodological domination in the realm of social sciences.When I was first asked to comment on the edited volume entitled Secrets of Economics Editors, I had no intention whatsoever to write the paragraph above. In fact, my original plan was to limit the commentary to a dull summary of the major themes tackled in the book. Having read the piece, however, I changed my mind and decided to use this opportunity to discuss the generic problems of academic publishing in economics. The reason for the change of the original plan is the fact that the book does a marvelous job in documenting those problems with the testimonies of the gatekeepers of the discipline (i.e. the editors) in an unintentionally ethnographic way.ThemesAs tlie first order of business, I would like to briefly inform the reader about the structure and content of the volume before moving on to the ideas in the piece that inspired me. The book consists of twenty-four short contributions in addition to the introduction. Each chapter reflects the experiences and opinions of the editors of academic journals serving for different audiences and/or sub-disciplines. Most of the contributions do the same job, which is to inform the potential authors, referees, and editors about what to do and what not to do when it conies to publishing, refereeing, and editing.In fact, the overlapping issues such as how to successfully navigate the manuscript through the review process (if you are an author) or how to process a large number of manuscripts (if you are an editor) taire too much space. The repetitiveness, thus, makes the piece a little bit tedious to read. A related problem is that contributions are organized hi accordance with the journal's area of specialization, rather than what the contributor tells the readers about. This organizational choice makes it more difficult for the reader to catch contributors' original points. The section on economics of is a good example for the problem. There is only one contribution concerning this field. This piece by Kaliane gives interesting insights about how of sports is a valuable field of study, yet the contribution is mostly about how the journal got started and survived; an important issue covered by other contributions in separate sections of the book. It seems the only condition that pieces of a similar content come together in the same section is that they do not fit anywhere else in terms of the field of the editor's journal. For instance, two pieces on plagiarism are given space next to each other in last section of the book, even though those editors run journals in different fields. In short, a thematic organization of the contributions in terms of the emphasis points in content could have made it easier for the contributors to deliver their messages. Editing a book on the editors is apparently not a cakewalk.Nevertheless, styles differ of a great variety from one piece to another. Furthermore, answers for similar questions differ from each other as well. For instance, should the editor take the responsibility for the final decision or should the coeditors take a decisive role in the process? Or, to what extent should an editor rely on the comments of the referees? …