More Options for Authors: Expanding the Paper Formats Considered at JCR
As of January 1, 2025, the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) will consider submissions in two additional formats: Registered Reports and Brief Commentaries.
Registered Reports
Registered Reports are empirical papers that go through the entire review process prior to collecting the final data, which is then collected and analyzed, after a conditional acceptance. Registered Reports should be written similarly to typical empirical papers, proposing a theoretical or practical contribution, situating that contribution in the research literature, describing the full research and data analysis design in detail, and explaining precisely how the results will be interpreted and mapped to conclusions. Such submissions would receive a full evaluation during the review process, including potential revisions.
To be successful, a Registered Report must make a convincing case that the final paper will make a JCR-worthy contribution regardless of how the results turn out. For this reason, Registered Reports are most commonly used when a case can be made for a two-sided hypothesis or for a test between competing theories. This would not be a good format for speculative research questions, where some set of empirical outcomes would fail to be informative. Registered Report submissions do have the option of providing pilot data to establish that the conditions for a meaningful test are likely to be met. However, all data collected prior to conditional acceptance will be reported in an appendix and the final paper should be based only on data collected and analyzed as specified in the accepted draft.
While Registered Reports are expected to constitute a very small proportion of JCR papers, the goal is to provide authors with an additional approach that may be useful in certain circumstances. The Registered Report format compels the authors and review team to agree on what would constitute a set of valid and sufficiently informative tests of the research question up front. For this reason, the format can be particularly useful for controversial questions, preventing debates over post-hoc reinterpretations or “moving the goal posts” during the review process. The Registered Report format can likewise be helpful for situations in which no additional data can be collected (such as field experiments) and in reducing authors’ costs of data collection by ensuring that only data for which there is a consensus on the informativeness will be collected (i.e., as opposed to collecting initial data that may then be deemed uninformative).
Brief Commentaries
The “Brief Commentary” format (e.g., as currently used in PNAS and sometimes in the past in JCR) is intended to provide a means for conveying important factual research-relevant information to the JCR community that does not fit the standard paper model. While the potential scope is left open, commentaries could convey reinterpretations of or disagreements with published findings, updates on best research practices, or explorations of the consumer research implications of new marketing practices, societal developments or policy changes, among other topics. The goal is to inform the JCR research community at a low page cost, and with rigorous peer-review. To avoid confusion with full research papers, titles of accepted commentaries will begin with “Brief Commentary:”.
It should be emphasized that Brief Commentaries are not intended to be opinion pieces or editorials. While Brief Commentaries will differ from typical JCR research papers in scope and intended contribution, the same criteria of internal validity, consumer relevance and applicability to a broad interdisciplinary audience will be applied during the review process. Brief Commentaries should be written in an objective and open-minded manner, with claims supported by valid factual evidence, including logical reasoning, citations to authoritative sources and, where applicable, relevant and informative empirical data. Brief Commentaries that are speculative or antagonistic, that provide a one-sided perspective or promote a narrow agenda will not be successful.
The specific evaluation criteria will likely evolve as JCR experiments with these new formats, to identify the best fit with the journal’s mission. We plan to hold a virtual discussion about these new formats in January of 2025. Please email Oleg Urminsky if you are interested in attending.
