How Do We Evaluate JCR Papers?
To be transparent and fair to authors, it is important that consistent manuscript guidelines be established and practiced by the review team.
To this end, the editors held multiple workshops with JCR Associate Editors in January/February 2021 to draft general evaluation guidelines for different types of papers.
Below, please find these guidelines which entail a short description of each type of paper, evaluation criteria, and a range of exemplars from past JCR papers.
- Conceptual papers
- Theory-driven empirical papers
- Substantive phenomena papers
- Consumer culture research papers
- (Multi-)methods and empirical quant papers
A Big Thank You for a Big Effort!
The process of developing the descriptions, roles, and evaluative criteria for the five basic categories of JCR papers was an important—and not surprisingly, effortful—endeavor. The editors relied on the wisdom and experience of the JCR community to make this process smooth and productive.
As a part of our onboarding meetings with our new set of AEs and ERB members, we described our vision for creating structure and transparency for authors by discussing, describing, and codifying the norms that exist at JCR around different types of papers. Further, we wanted to make clear (to authors and reviewers alike) the evaluative criteria that guide our reviews by publishing them on our website.
To do this, we set up five workshops with our AEs to develop the criteria, with an eye to improving the experience of authors and the constructive nature of the review process. In the workshops and afterwards, we circulated criteria documents and ideas for exemplar papers with the AEs. JCR authors with considerable experience in each domain helped structure our workshops; a big thank you to Eileen Fischer, Jim Bettman, Debbie MacInnis, Chris Janiszewski, and Michel Pham for their assistance. And, of course, a big thanks to our AEs!
The end result, we believe, is a set of documents that will give much needed clarity to authors as well as guidelines that will help bring added consistency among reviewers. We hope these documents will make for a more transparent and constructive review process.
