Protocols under this Editorship

Governance

As an editorial team, we will foster clarity and transparency for both authors and reviewers. We are strong believers in evidence-based decision making and will make that a cornerstone of our editorship.

Motivated by the successful system built by the current editorial team, we have composed a team of four editors equally responsible for the well-being and direction of the journal. Darren Dahl will serve as editor-in-chief (EIC) in our governance structure. The EIC will be (a) the starting point for the initial assignment of manuscripts to one of the four editors; (b) the main point of contact for appeals and inquiries (via the editorial office); (c) the liaison to the managing editor with respect to administrative issues; and (d) the liaison to the policy board with respect to journal policy.

A strong team of Associate Editors (AEs) is a critical aspect of our governance strategy. Our role as editors is to be generalists; our AEs will function as specialist experts who synthesize reviews for authors. We expect that AEs will take a high level perspective on papers, which entails (a) interpreting and prioritizing reviews to help papers achieve their full contribution; (b) offering decisive opinions on submissions early in the process to facilitate an efficient termination for those papers that will not advance through the review process; and (c) creating effective roadmaps for manuscripts that do proceed in the process. Over the past three years, successful papers at the journal have reached a conditional acceptance decision in an average of 2.72 rounds of review. We aim for a review process that is as efficient and effective as possible.

Review Process

When an editor is first assigned a paper, a decision will be made on whether to send the manuscript out for review or to desk reject it. We intend to assign three reviewers to each submission that moves past the initial desk review. In terms of the categories of responses authors might receive in the manuscript disposition process, we will no longer utilize the “reject/submit new” category. Instead, we will adopt a simpler categorization (i.e., reject, risky-revision, revision, conditional-accept, and accept) and clearly communicate specific reactions to each individual submission in the decision letter.

Integrity

Research integrity is of fundamental importance to science and scientific progress. Our ability to advance knowledge about consumers requires that consumer research be accurately reported and replicable by others. The JCR Policy Board sets the policies of the journal in this regard and we will work closely with them to ensure that JCR continues to be a journal that publishes research that readers can trust is accurate and that others can build upon. As noted in the editorial published in 2012 (http://doi.org/10.1086/667924), it is important that we continue to build and foster a community of trust.

We will continue to employ the changes the Policy Board and the current editors have implemented such as the inclusion of contribution and data collection and analysis paragraphs, the requirements that authors disclose information about their own related papers at submission, and the use of anti-plagiarism software at the conditional acceptance stage of the process. We will also continue to encourage authors, if they choose to do so, to include materials (i.e., study stimuli, survey instruments, etc.) in a web appendix as part of the review process. When papers reach the stage of acceptance we will formally offer authors the opportunity to upload their full materials in a web appendix (if they have not already done so). As a new initiative, authors will be able to register their data with a third-party archiving service (JCR will pay for this). We recognize that this request is not applicable to all research paradigms and it is optional. Published papers will include links to the relevant websites if web appendices and/or data have been uploaded.

We also think it is important to use the review process to encourage best reporting practices. Specifically, we will continue to remind reviewers and AEs that they have the right to query authors (through the editor) for more information as dictated by the review process, whether it be specific to experimental materials utilized, analyses conducted, or data employed.

We will also work with reviewers and AEs to ensure that the review process is fair to authors, recognizes the realities of the research process, and is appropriate given the intended contribution of the research and the research approach employed. No paper is perfect or the final word on a topic. Given there is no one formula or paradigm for consumer research, there is no one size fits all set of evaluative criteria reviewers should employ when evaluating manuscripts.  We believe that different styles of research require different evaluative criteria and we hope to enhance overall awareness among reviewers that the evaluative criteria they employ should depend on the research approach and goals of the manuscript under review.

Submission

The following short paragraphs provide direct guidance with respect to submission expectations and protocols that will be adopted during our editorship:

Style: All manuscripts should follow the JCR submission guidelines. Starting July 1, 2014, see http://ejcr.org/guidelines.htm. New requests include: a) embedding tables and figures throughout the manuscript for the review process; and b) increasing the length of abstracts to no more than 200 words.

Contribution Statement: The page following the title page must include a contribution statement before the abstract. The purpose of the contribution statement is to summarize the new contribution this manuscript makes to knowledge beyond the existing literature (in fewer than 300 words). It should not merely replicate the information in the abstract. See http://ejcr.org/contribution-statement.htm for more information and examples.

Abstract: Abstracts should carefully summarize your research. The abstract should include (in fewer than 200 words): a) Motivation/Problem (what gap does your research fill?); b) Approach/Methods; c) Results/Findings; and d) Implications and Conclusions. In crafting your abstract, please recognize that JCR is an interdisciplinary journal and we aspire to being read by a wide variety of scholars. Hence, this is a good time to think about including terms and descriptions that will allow your article to be found by scholars likely to be interested in your theories, your substantive findings, and methods. More generally, please also make the writing in your abstract accessible, so that the importance of your paper will be transparent to a wide variety of scholars who may see your abstract in online journal databases.

Methods reporting: Authors are expected to be fully transparent with respect to sampling and participant inclusion, research design and procedures, stimulus materials, and the measurement approaches utilized in their work.

Results reporting: Authors should be comprehensive in their reporting of results. Means, standard deviations, effect sizes, etc. should all be reported where applicable.

Submission: The Editor for each manuscript will be selected by the Editor-in-Chief and authors should not request a specific Editor. Authors are, however, encouraged to identify appropriate AEs and Reviewers for their work at the time of submission. Please provide a note to the Editors that might highlight any special features of your manuscript. Authors are also encouraged to directly indicate if their work is multidisciplinary in nature so that we can take this into account when assigning reviewers.

Response to Reviewers/Revision Notes: When responding to a revision request, authors are encouraged to provide a response to the review team. Revision notes should be as long as necessary, but our recommendation is that responses should focus on the AE report for guidance and fall between 5 to 8 pages in length.