Abstract
The 2020-2021 academic year has been a year filled with challenges that have required us to collectively rethink and reevaluate some of the structures that are a part of our academic systems, cultures, and communities. In that spirit, this editorial essay will provide some helpful information regarding the review process for junior scholars and serve as a good reminder to those who have been around for a bit longer. I recently talked to the AEJMC Graduate Student Interest Group about the peer review process and found out that it would be helpful to explain some of the details about the process followed by most academic journals today. This editorial essay will also address why reviewers are important to Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ), give some tips for being a good reviewer, and discuss what constitutes a good review.
As most of our readers know, JMCQ uses a double-blind peer review process. This means that the identities of both the author and the reviewers remain anonymous. Each article is typically assessed by three external reviewers who offer feedback and suggestions aimed at strengthening the paper and helping the authors do their best possible work. Put simply, academic journals would not be able to function without reviewers.
Reviewers
As academics, we often get requests to volunteer our time as manuscript reviewers—a service for which we do not get paid and do not receive much recognition. So why is it still worth doing when we are already busy with a myriad of other engagements? First, consider that it provides an opportunity to stay up to date with current developments in the field. In other words, it gives us an excuse to read the most recent scholarship. Second, it allows reviewers to affect the direction of that scholarship as well as the direction of the journal. Finally, it offers us the chance to be part of a scholarly community that we care about and support the work of our colleagues.
As the Editor-in-Chief, I am tremendously grateful to our journal reviewers for their contributions. Reviewers automatically receive a 25% discount on all SAGE books, free access to all SAGE journals and e-book products for 60 days, and acknowledgment for their review on Publons and ORCHID, if desired. In addition, reviewers who perform well throughout the year may be selected to join as Editorial Board members the following year.
This year, the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly affected scholars and reviewers on both personal and professional levels. In response, the editorial staff adopted a more flexible policy for review deadlines. If anyone is struggling to get a review done, please reach out and let the editors know that an extension is needed. Instead of clicking “unavailable” when a review opportunity hits your inbox, please consider these benefits, and remember how critical reviews are to the community of scholars.
Reviewers are selected based on their theoretical and methodological expertise as well as regional or topical area(s). They are expected to return their reviews within 30 days and notify the editor of any potential conflicts of interest. Reviewers receive friendly reminders if a review is past due. Reviews are evaluated in the system based on the timeliness and quality of the review. The next section discusses what it takes to perform a quality review.
Reviewing
Being a good reviewer takes practice, and most of us do not get to start this practice until we are already in a faculty position. The truth is that few of us were taught how to be good reviewers while we were in graduate school. Past Editor, Dr. Louisa Ha started a reviewer training program as a service to the profession to address this gap. The announcement for the next iteration of that program will be coming out soon.
When reviewing a manuscript, please remember the “golden rule,” which is to write the kind of review you would like to receive as a submitting author. Reviews should be professional in tone and give constructive feedback for improvement. Most good reviews start with a few general observations about the theory and methods and then move on to specific content-level questions and comments. The best reviews make big-picture observations regarding the overall contribution of the research and put the study in a comparative context by explaining how this research builds upon or extends literature in the area.
Peer reviewing is based on ethics and trust, both of which are required to preserve the integrity of the review process. JMCQ is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which offers some useful resources and guidelines for ethical peer review. As COPE underscores on their website, “The peer review process depends to a large extent on the trust and willing participation of the scholarly community and requires that everyone involved behaves responsibly and ethically.” It is essential to produce ethical reviews that maintain the integrity of the peer review process and support quality research.
Reviews
While good reviews may vary somewhat in terms of length and style, they share some common characteristics: they are substantive, fair, professional, and timely. A good review should ultimately help the author(s) improve their manuscript. It is important that the positive aspects of the submission are highlighted first before moving on to criticism. I also find that the most effective reviews acknowledge what the study does well and then ask whether additional aspects were considered and how adding these in the future may make the research stronger. This goes back to the “golden rule” of reviewing: Do unto the author as you would like done to you.
It is helpful if the review states whether the recommended changes are considered minor or if the revisions need to be extensive enough that they will require a significant overhaul of the paper. This is helpful to the editors because we need to consider how realistic a revise and resubmit (R&R) is within the allotted time frame. Reviewers can put confidential comments to the editor in a separate section where they can be more direct about issues such as plagiarism concerns or report that they are reviewing the same article at another journal—both of which are considered serious ethical lapses.
Finally, if you want to learn more about peer reviews and the journal publishing process, please follow our Twitter campaign by typing #JMCQDemystified in the search bar. Additional resources that further explain what components should be included in a peer review and the expectations for journal reviewers are listed below:
https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/cope-ethical-guidelines-peer-reviewers
Summary of Current Issue
The first set of articles in the summer issue focus on the relationship between audience comprehension and involvement and different types of media exposure. Lee and Yin extend recent research on selective exposure and news sources through a network analytic approach to examine selective consumption in Hong Kong’s contemporary media environment. Instead of focusing on overall levels of audience fragmentation, they investigated whether political stances and the market position of newspapers matter when explaining readership overlap that ties two newspapers together. Readership survey data showed that predictors of readership overlap do not vary for news consumers based on their partisanship affiliation, but depend on the newspaper’s elite status and language.
Looking at perceptions of newspaper content in the social media environment, the study by Chen and Pain showed that Facebook and major newspapers mutually benefited by building brand loyalty of both. However, the authors also noted that reading news from major brands on Facebook rather than going to the news sites directly could create an illusory loyalty toward a news brand. Nevertheless, both Facebook and newspapers tended to benefit when news is distributed through the Facebook platform.
In two experimental studies, Lee, Liu, Choung, and McLeod examined whether the interaction between statistical data presentation and different types of frames leads to differential effects. Their results showed that indeed numerical presentation formats embedded in the gain/loss frame made a difference for audience comprehension. Furthermore, different comprehension levels shaped negative emotions differently, affecting how the audience perceived the seriousness of an issue. This study showed that if the goal is to help people understand statistics, the percentage format can produce more accurate and reliable judgments than the frequency format for the same set of numerical data.
Another experimental study by Oschatz, Emde-Lachmund, and Klimmt explored the persuasive potential of exemplars in the news through narrative involvement. The results showed that the audience perceives information on news exemplars as “mini-stories”; experiences some narrative involvement, including a benevolent, noncritical stance toward the position advocated by the story content; and is likely to shift attitudes and behavioral intentions in a message-consistent direction.
Looking at inspirational media consumption, Janicke-Bowles and colleagues found that the transcendent character traits of gratitude and spirituality were strong predictors of inspiring media exposure. These specific transcendent characteristics also made it more likely that people would share and create inspirational media content. Attendance at a religious or spiritual community was unrelated to inspirational media consumption, but instead, inspirational consumption contributed to day-to-day transcendent emotions and experiences.
The next set of articles focus on news bias and media stereotypes. Kroon, Trilling, and Raats investigated universal dimensions of stereotype content across diverse ethnic ingroups and outgroups. The authors traced the extent of ethnic bias and showed that it did increase over time in a sample of more than 3 million Dutch news items. Using word embeddings to capture media stereotypes, they found that news content stereotypes aligned with negative societal stereotypes, especially depictions of outgroups as low status and high threat. They also documented increasing negative stereotypes for the outgroups over time while evaluations of the ingroup remained stable.
In a similar vein, Sommer and Kühne’s study examined stereotyping of Muslims in Germany and found that people would change their attitudes and intentions if they believed that a news story would unfairly affect other peoples’ attitudes about a minority group. In other words, participants would not change their attitude based on their own bias but on how they perceived an article would negatively affect someone else’s bias. Interestingly, if the stereotypes were perceived as reasonable, then the negative news reinforced existing biases.
Using content analysis and large-scale behavioral data, Lee and Chen’s study assessed the effects of emotional framing of sexual assault on news viewers’ engagement with different political ideologies. They found that news organizations with conservative views headlined significantly more sentiments of anxiety, anger, and sex to arouse news engagement behaviors. Their study also showed that headlines that produced anxiety were associated with avoidance, while descriptions with more sexuality cues were associated with engagement.
The last set of articles examine media use, political expression, and policy support. This section begins with an article about second screening. Second screening is the practice of consuming media from two different screens simultaneously, such as playing a game on your phone while watching television. The study addressed the question of how it is related to political expression. The research utilized data from a two-wave panel survey in Hong Kong to study the role of second screening in public engagement. Chen found that second screening can encourage engagement when used to lean-in and become part of the public discussion, but not as much when used as a passive information gathering method.
Using historical letters, memos, and reports, Bates examined the history of journalism between 1959 and 1962 while the Commission on Freedom of the Press tried to create a press council housed at an elite university. He addressed the question why this movement failed and interrogated what was lost for the study of journalism, concluding that if the press council had found a university home, it might have raised journalism’s academic standing as a field of research.
The final article in this issue examined news readers’ reactions when presented with both civil and uncivil commentary on Facebook or in comment sections. Naab, Naab, and Brandmeier found that the incivility level of user comments had a direct effect on support for restrictions and intent to engage in corrective actions unless the audience agreed with the negative attitude toward the group being attacked. They also found that individuals were more likely to perceive that others were more susceptible to uncivil user comments than they were themselves.
Enjoy the summer 2021 issue of JMCQ!