Guides · Submitting and peer review

How to choose a journal for a marketing paper

Choose by fit first. Editors screen submissions for fit with the journal's positioning before any review, and at the Journal of Marketing and JAMS a third or more of submissions were desk rejected in the mid-2010s, according to their editors. Model your paper on recent articles in the target journal, match your type of contribution and your intended audience to its readership, and use impact factors only as a secondary check.

Fit is screened before quality

At many journals the editor decides at the first read whether a paper goes out for review. At the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), the editor checks whether a submission fits the journal's positioning and has a realistic chance of acceptance within a few revision rounds. Papers that fail either test are desk rejected, which the 2016 editorial put at 40 to 60% of submissions. JAMS reported an acceptance rate of 7.5% for 2014.^[1]

The Journal of Marketing reported about 1,650 submissions from 2013 to 2015, roughly 550 a year. About 65% went through review and the rest were desk rejected; about 12% of reviewed papers were published, an overall acceptance rate of 8%. The editor named lack of generalizability as the leading reason for desk rejection. These are editors' self-reports for the years stated, but they show that a mismatch with the journal ends many submissions before a reviewer sees them.^[2]

Read the positioning, then model recent papers

A journal's positioning is more concrete than its title suggests. JAMS names behavioural research without meaningful managerial insight, scale development and purely methodological papers as usually poor fits, because it wants behavioural effects linked to performance outcomes or managerial interventions. The Journal of Marketing asks for actionable managerial implications, writes for both academics and practitioners, and under an American Marketing Association policy does not publish articles whose contribution is primarily modelling.^[1][2]

The JAMS editor's advice to authors new to the journal is to model a paper on recent articles in JAMS and the Journal of Marketing that use a similar design and method. This shows the expected positioning, format and standards, and it helps tie the paper to the managerial research the journal builds on. He adds that papers citing neither journal are often poorly linked to relevant work and fit badly.^[1]

Recent tables of contents show what a journal takes in practice. Of 132 Journal of Marketing articles from 2013 to 2015, about 60% were in marketing management and strategy and 40% in consumer behaviour. The editor observed that strategy authors usually submit there first, while many consumer behaviour papers arrive after rejection at other journals.^[2]

Match the type of contribution to the outlet

Journals differ in the kinds of contribution they publish. Of the 132 Journal of Marketing articles from 2013 to 2015, 116 had an empirical focus, 79 a conceptual focus and 9 a review focus, with many articles combining two of these.^[2]

Conceptual and review papers need a carefully chosen home. A 2011 Journal of Marketing essay reported that purely conceptual articles had declined in top marketing journals and that summary papers were often pushed to specialised journals or book chapters, and it urged editors to say openly whether they welcome such work. JAMS did: its 2016 editorial stated a particular interest in papers that synthesise and integrate marketing theory, and a 2018 editorial described a process in which review authors submit a detailed outline and receive assurance on the contribution hurdle before the full paper is reviewed. The same editorial notes that review papers often meet reviewer objections that they offer no new data.^[3][1][4]

Choose the audience you want to reach

Marketing journals serve different communities. A citation map of 49 marketing and related journals separated managerial from consumer-oriented journals on one axis and formal or quantitative from applied or descriptive journals on the other, and grouped them into five subareas. Each subarea had a different leading journal: the Journal of Marketing Research in core marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research in consumer behaviour, Harvard Business Review in managerial marketing, the Journal of Marketing in marketing applications and the Journal of Marketing Education in marketing education. The Journal of Marketing had the broadest influence across subareas.^[5]

Who cites a journal is a further clue. Citations to the Journal of Marketing came relatively more from management and general business journals, while the Journal of Marketing Research drew relatively more from psychology and consumer behaviour. Both were cited by practitioner-oriented publications, whereas the Journal of Consumer Research was cited almost only by academic journals. These data cover articles published up to 1986, so use them as a way to think about audience rather than as a current map.^[6]

Clear the contribution bar the journal applies

Fit with scope is necessary but not sufficient. JAMS names a second group of desk rejections: papers that do not contribute enough, such as models made up mostly of main effects tested on cross-sectional survey data, where common method variance undermines the findings, and papers that test known effects in a new context by varying only the country or product.^[1]

The Journal of Marketing editor gave a similar warning about narrow studies. A paper on one firm's market potential for one segment in one country yields insights that do not transfer, unless the authors develop a general theory and use the setting to demonstrate it. After review, rejections cited weak or missing theory, thin coverage of the literature, methodological problems, small incremental contributions and missing managerial implications.^[2]

An editor of the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing lists four mistaken beliefs behind many rejections for lack of contribution: that a large model with many paths contributes by its size, that more hypotheses mean more contribution, that being the first study of a topic or setting is a contribution, and that applying a well-known theory to a new field contributes by itself. All of these sources are editors' opinions based on the submissions they handled.^[7][1][2]

Use metrics as a secondary check

Impact factors are easy to compare but answer a narrow question. Among marketing journals, the SSCI impact factor correlated only moderately with a network measure of journal influence and not significantly with faculty rankings of journals. In the behavioural and brain sciences, impact factors were weak and inconsistent predictors of statistical accuracy and replicability. A journal's average also says little about any one article, because a small share of papers attracts most citations.^[5][8][9]

The choice of journal does relate to later citations. In a study of five major marketing journals from 1990 to 2002, the median Journal of Marketing article was cited more often than the median article in the other four journals, yet article quality was the most important driver of citations, and longer articles were cited more.^[10]

A shortlisting checklist

• Read each candidate journal's recent editorials for its stated positioning and for any statement on conceptual, review or methodological papers.^[1][3]
• Find several recent articles in the journal with a design and method like yours, and use them as models for framing and format.^[1]
• Check that your reference list engages the journal's recent work on your topic.^[1]
• Write down the general contribution that holds beyond your specific firm, country or sample.^[2]
• Test the contribution against common mistaken beliefs, such as treating more hypotheses or a new setting as a contribution in itself.^[7]
• Decide which community you want to reach and which journals lead in that subarea.^[5][6]
• Expect a quick answer on fit. JAMS reported an average first-round turnaround of 37 days in 2014, and its editor presents early desk decisions as a way to give faster feedback on papers unlikely to succeed there.^[1]
• Watch for a reject-and-resubmit option. The Journal of Marketing may offer one even at the desk stage when a paper shows promise but needs substantial rework.^[2]

The evidence behind this

• Citation analysis: what citation counts do and don't tell you
• Marketing knowledge: how it is made and when to trust it

References

1. Robert W. Palmatier (2016). Editorial: the past, present, and future of JAMS. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
2. V. Kumar (2016). My Reflections on Publishing in Journal of Marketing. Journal of Marketing.
3. Deborah J. MacInnis (2011). A Framework for Conceptual Contributions in Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 75(4), 136–154.
4. Robert W. Palmatier, Mark B. Houston, John Hulland (2018). Review articles: purpose, process, and structure. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 46(1), 1–5.
5. Hans Baumgartner, Rik Pieters (2003). The Structural Influence of Marketing Journals: A Citation Analysis of the Discipline and its Subareas over Time. Journal of Marketing.
6. Joseph A. Cote, Siew Meng Leong, Jane Cote (1992). Assessing the influence of marketing research on the social science literature. Marketing Letters.
7. Cheng Lu Wang (2022). Editorial – The misassumptions about contributions. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 16(1), 1–2.
8. Michael R. Dougherty, Zachary Horne (2022). Citation counts and journal impact factors do not capture some indicators of research quality in the behavioural and brain sciences. Royal Society Open Science.
9. Ludo Waltman (2016). A review of the literature on citation impact indicators. Journal of Informetrics.
10. Stefan Stremersch, Isabel Verniers, Peter C. Verhoef (2007). The Quest for Citations: Drivers of Article Impact. Journal of Marketing.

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