Journal of Retailing – Status, Awards, and Outlook

We hope you all are keeping safe from the COVID-19 pandemic. The continuing threat of the virus has prevented travel and forced meetings and conferences to go virtual. As a result, the American Marketing Association’s Summer Educators’ Conference held in August 2020, where we normally present the status of the journal, announce awards, and discuss future outlook with the JR Editorial Review Board, was shifted to virtual mode. We therefore communicated the status report to ERB members by email. We are happy to share some of its key elements with our readers.

The Journal of Retailing is in excellent shape in terms of manuscript submissions, journal impact factor, CiteScore, and manuscript turn-around time. As of September 1, 2020, we have received 350 submissions in 2020, and expect to process over 500 manuscripts this year. That is a 25% increase over the 409 submissions that were processed in 2019. The journal impact factor, which measures the average number of citations received that year by papers published in the journal in prior two years, has increased from 3.77 in 2016 to 5.87 in 2019. The CiteScore, which measures the average citations received that year per peer-reviewed document published over the previous four years, has increased from 4.64 in 2016 to 8.70 in 2019. Finally, the average turnaround time from manuscript submission to decision has decreased from 62 days in 2019 to 48 days in the first half of 2020.

We have also encouraged research on current, cutting-edge topics through our editorials, expert commentaries, special sections, special issues, and by organizing related retail conferences. During 2019–2020, we are pleased to have published three commentaries – Singh et al. (2019) on organizational frontlines research, Bolton (2019) on responsible research in retailing, and Robertson, Hamilton, and Jap (2020) on the evolving nature of retail product returns; one special section on Retail Frontline Management (June 2019), guest edited by Martin Mende and Stephanie Noble; and two special issues — the December 2019 special issue focused on Sensory Aspects of Retailing, guest edited by Dipayan Biswas and the March 2020 special issue focused on Retail Experience and the Customer Journey, guest edited by Dhruv Grewal and Anne Roggeveen. In addition, our June 2020 editorial focused on how the COVID-19 pandemic may change the world of retailing (Roggeveen and Sethuraman 2020a).

We also co-organized four conferences to promote academic research and collegial interaction on important retailing topics – a conference on data privacy in retailing in Florence, Italy in June 2019; a conference on what’s next in retailing in Fayetteville, Arkansas in October 2019; a conference on retail metrics and analytics in Atlanta, Georgia in November 2019; and a virtual conference (track) on data-based retailing in June 2020.

We greatly appreciate all the authors, reviewers, and readers of the journal who have made these initiatives possible. The quality of an academic journal is very much dependent on the quality of manuscripts the journal receives and the quality of the review process that make these manuscripts rigorous and impactful. With respect to manuscript quality, it is our pleasure to announce the winners of the 2020 Davidson Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Retailing in 2019. The winners are:

Herhausen, Dennis, Kristina Kleinlercher, Peter C. Verhoef, Oliver Emrich, Thomas Rudolph (2019), “Loyalty formation for different customer journey segments,” Journal of Retailing, 95(3), September, 9–29.

The runners-up for the award are:

Verma, Swati, Abhijit Guha, Abhijit Biswas, and Dhruv Grewal (2019), “Are low price and price matching guarantees equivalent? The effects of different price guarantees on consumers' evaluations,” Journal of Retailing, 95(3), September, 99–108.

The selection for Davidson Award is based on voting by members of the JR Editorial Review Board.

With respect to review process, we engage over 300 reviewers whose selfless dedication and commitment enable us to process papers in a timely and constructive manner. We are delighted to announce the 2020 outstanding reviewers who have provided yeoman service to the journal by processing a significant number of submissions and providing high quality, timely reviews in 2019. The outstanding reviewers are:

Todd Arnold, Els Breugelmans, Abhijit Guha, Harmen Oppewal, and Vanessa Patrick.

Our congratulations to the Davidson Award winners and to the Outstanding Reviewers!

Looking to the future, we are taking steps to strengthen our current initiatives. Four upcoming special section/issues are in process – a special section on Big Data and Privacy in Retailing (December 2020), guest edited by Kelly Martin and Rob Palmatier; a special issue on the Future of Retailing: Academic and Practitioner Thought Leaders’ Perspectives (March 2021), guest edited by Dinesh Gauri and Dhruv Grewal; a special issue on Metrics and Analytics in Retailing (expected October 2021), guest edited by V. Kumar and Raj Venkatesan; and a special issue on Data-based Retailing: Review and New Directions (expected March 2022), guest edited by Raj Sethuraman and Russ Winer. Also, in this (September 2020) issue, we have written a commentary providing a new framework and offering future research directions on Customer-Interfacing Retail Technologies (Roggeveen and Sethuraman 2020b).

In addition, we plan to develop further initiatives related to content development and communication to maintain and enhance the heritage of the journal as a leading publisher of high-quality academic research on all aspects of Retailing. With your support, we are confident that the future looks bright for the journal.