Advice to authors before submitting an article to JMR:
- Define your incremental contribution. Look at back issues of JMR and other marketing journals and, where appropriate, statistical, econometric, or psychology journals. It is important initially to define both what has been done and what differentiates your research. Articles that simply replicate a known methodology or theory will have a difficult time getting published at JMR.
- Link to recent issues. It is important that your article reflect current research. Accepted articles that have been reviewed and accepted but are not yet in print are available in the "Forthcoming Articles" section of the JMR’s Web site. These articles reflect the newest thinking in the journal and thus are very important for positioning your article. Note that other journals are also providing preprints for their accepted articles, enabling you to reference them as well. In addition, you can find related work using search engines such as Google Scholar.
- Be careful about overlap. If your research is too similar to what has been done before, it is unlikely to be accepted. If you have published similar work before, you should reference it, positioning your current paper as an extension of your earlier work. If you have any questions about whether to reference earlier work or about whether your work reflects sufficient incremental contribution over earlier work, send a note to the editor at jmr@ama.org.
- Consider the managerial implications. Articles in JMR do not require direct managerial implications. However, they should ultimately affect how marketers manage, faculty teach, and people think about consuming and interacting in markets. It is important to indicate in your concluding section how your article could change these actions. Even if your article does not provide ways management might be altered, it is important to specify how the managerial implications of your article could be tested.
- Match JMR style. This is not imperative on the first round. JMR will initially review articles with a broad range of styles and suggest style changes in the revise-and-resubmit process. However, using a strongly different style signals to reviewers and editors that you did not make an effort to adjust your manuscript to JMR norms. As with any journal, adjusting to JMR’s style increases the likelihood of a positive initial response.
- Build a strong abstract and title. Your abstract communicates your key findings and encourages the reader to read the rest of the paper. Spend time on both the abstract and the title, as a well-crafted beginning can greatly increase the impact of your paper.
- Ask colleagues to review your paper. Choose two kinds of readers: (1) a reader who knows the subject area well and will criticize your method from that perspective and (2) a colleague who is less familiar with your subject area. That reading will show you what you need to do to make your article accessible to a broader range of readers. Note that asking a colleague to make such a review is not a minor favor; you will owe the colleague the same rigorous review of a paper in return. In addition, consider having the paper copy edited so that it reads well from the start.