As anticipated, my submission to a second journal of my paper on Sraffa received a desk-rejection, in the morning of 8 January. The editor at the second journal, like that at the first, suggested submitting to a journal on the history of economic thought.

I decided to go ahead to do just that, but found that my first choice amongst such journals both wanted the article to be submitted in the format of Microsoft Word, and was somewhat particular about the appearance of formulæ. I do not have any recent versions of MS Word running on any computer, and the computers on which I have old versions installed are old devices, tucked-away, and of course I wouldn't in any case want to reënter the whole article from the keyboard. So I wrestled with going from LAΤΕΧ (by way of LyX) to DOCX by various means, with the formulæ repeatedly trashed in the process. I stepped-away from the problem a few times, rather than become over-stressed.

Finally, early this morning, I had a version that I thought were good enough to submit. I stepped-away again until to-night, and then effected a submission.

A few problems threaten this submission. First, the journal normally wants articles of 11,000 words or fewer, whereäs this article is about 12,665. Second, as may be inferred from their insistence upon the format of Microsoft Word, this journal leans away from mathematic presentation. Third, historians might — rather reasonably — see the article as better placed in a journal of theory than of history; I do not, for example, much discuss the position of Sraffa's book in historic context.

If the paper is rejected in whole or in part on that last basis, then of course I will make a note of such objection in any subsequent submission to a journal of economic theory.

As to how I effected the conversion, I used LyX to export a file in ODT format, then used LibreOffice Writer to do extensive clean-up and export to DOCX, then reïmported the DOCX file into LibreOffice Writer, and effected a second extensive clean-up, the results of which I later submitted.

Tags: neo-Ricardianism, papers, Piero Sraffa, Post-Keynesianism, Sraffa, writing

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