V. Kumar, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Marketing, shared his advice on getting published and reacting to reviewer feedback along with other insights during Winter AMA 2016 in Las Vegas.
1. What does publishing an impactful paper mean to you?
The short answer to this question is that JM articles should have actionable managerial implications. Irrespective of the focal area of the article or the type of methodology used, articles published in JM typically are rigorous and have meaningful, generalizable, and managerially relevant implications. With regard to the domains of knowledge, all articles published in JM can be broadly classified into marketing management and strategy (MM&S) or consumer behavior (CB). The articles can be classified in to one of the following three groups: conceptual, empirical, and review focus. I believe that the marketing community will be better served if we adopt a rigor and relevance approach as opposed to a rigor versus relevance approach.
Although many in the academic community area are aware of (and even focus too much on) empirical rigor, theoretical and analytical rigor also exist and are often ignored. Rigor thus should not be limited to study methodologies but should also be applied to articles’ conceptual and analytical frameworks. Authors can incorporate rigor into articles by (1) reviewing published articles in scholarly journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and Marketing Science; (2) introducing from other disciplines such as economics, statistics, and psychology; and (3) interacting with peers in academia.
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Andy Seagram is the Journals Director for the American Marketing Association. You can reach him at aseagram@ama.org.