Special Session: Reviewing the Reviewers-Insights on How to Read, Interpret, and Respond to Reviewers: An Abstract

Abstract

In recent years at “Meet the Journal Editors” sessions at academic conferences, many editors indicate that they desk reject 50% or higher manuscript submissions and have annual acceptance rates ranging between 7 and 18%, implying that journal reviewers provide editors with information that results in rejecting approximately 32–43% of the manuscripts that enter the journal review process. While there are many potential factors for explaining the extremely high journal rejection rates, there is a growing concern suggesting that journal editorial review systems are broken and need radical fixing. A recent JAMS editorial by Lehmann and Winer (2017) provides some excellent insights to the current role and impact of journal reviewers in the marketing discipline, but those insights are entrenched more from the editors’ (current and past) perspective rather than editorial reviewers’.

As the title suggests, the main objective of this special panel session is to provide a meaningful interactive dialogue with the audience and several acknowledged excellent editorial reviewers that creates invaluable instructional and tactical insights on not only understanding reviewers but also on how to read, interpret, and respond to reviews.

While the following topics/questions initially frame the session, topics might change based on the audience’s interactions.

• 1. What is review process integrity?

• 2. What is (or should be) reviewer integrity?

• 3. In what way (s) can the review process be unfair?

• 4. What can authors do when reviewers are wrong?

• 5. How does an author provide convincing arguments that the research results support significant (meaningful) contributions to the marketing literatures?

• 6. Is there a “best practice” approach in handling reviewers’ concerns/suggestions for manuscript changes?

Providing insights to these topics/questions will not only increase authors’ understanding of reviewers, the journal review process, and the inherent subjective biases but also gain insights to how to better interpret and develop tactful responses to reviewers’ confusing and/or unreasonable requested manuscript changes. While no journal review process is perfect, information from this special session will give researchers/authors insights on how to deal with both revise and resubmit (R&R) and rejected (R) manuscript situations.