A Manuscript's Journey Through Peer Review: Insights from Almost 3,000 Editorial Decisions at the Journal of Marketing Research

As editors of the Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), we have had the privilege of shepherding thousands of manuscripts through the peer review process. In addition to authors, the peer review process at JMR involves reviewers, associate editors (AEs), and coeditors (CoEs), as well as production and managing editors. Reviewers and AEs play a crucial role as advisers to CoEs in deciding what to publish, as well as in providing feedback to authors that can help improve the quality of manuscripts. Despite its critical and widely acknowledged importance, many see the peer review process as shrouded in a degree of mystery, which is necessary in part to maintain objectivity of evaluators, protect authors’ intellectual property, minimize conflicts of interest, and preserve the anonymity of reviewers and authors in our double-anonymized system. Our unique position provided us access to behind-the-scenes data about the peer review process at JMR. The goal of this editorial is to use these data to empirically describe the review process and answer questions that are of interest to key stakeholders of the journal: authors, reviewers, editorial board members, and researchers in general. Some of the questions that we address are as follows: