Why Reviewing Manuscripts for JMCQ and Posting Full Research Materials Online Are Smart Things to Do

Abstract

More and more refereed scholarly journals in the science and social science fields today require that research protocols and other supplementary research materials of the articles they publish are uploaded online. Such materials can be the complete list of article titles used in a bibliometric study, the experiment stimuli in an experiment, the coding scheme in a content analysis, and the survey questionnaire in a survey or even data sets. This is to ensure full transparency of the research they publish to allow for replication and checking. In our summer editorial board meeting at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference, the attending board members agreed that this can be a good practice; one that can encourage research replication, use of the coding scheme or scales. However, to avoid too much burden on the authors, we made it an opt-in process on a trial basis and will not require data posting. Effective October 1, 2015, we informed authors of our accepted manuscripts that they have the option of providing research materials as supplementary information, by posting them online alongside the research article. They would continue to have the copyright on those materials. We then posted two of our OnlineFirst articles with these supplementary materials: (a) Mapping the Social Capital Research in Communication: A Bibliometric Analysis by Chul-joo Lee and Dongyoung Sohn and (b) Are Newspapers' Online Discussion Boards Democratic Tools or Conspiracy Theories' Engines? A Case Study on an Eastern European Media War by Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova. Readers need to go to the online version to retrieve the supplementary materials.I would love to hear feedback from our readers on the full research material posting practice, and encourage authors of accepted manuscripts to post their materials. Without the print constraint of space, I hope this will provide readers interested in a topic a more complete experience in consuming the research produced by the authors, facilitate students and junior scholars to learn how to prepare research materials, and promote more follow-up studies.The increase in new submissions to Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ) has almost doubled in the past year. Hence, the Publications Committee and AEJMC board approved the inclusion of a fifth associate editor. Sei-Hill Kim of University of South Carolina joined our editorial team to help handle the influx of manuscripts.As we begin 2016, on behalf of our entire editorial team, I would like to express my greatest gratitude to our hard-working reviewers who generously volunteered their time and shared their insights and advice in their reviews to the authors last year. A total of 519 ad hoc reviewers completed reviews for us, in addition to our 80 board members. The list of reviewers and the number of manuscripts they reviewed for us are listed at the end of this essay. As more and more universities would like evidence of the review service for merit and other purposes, I encourage our reviewers to track their review record with dates in the Reviewer Center of the Manuscript Central/Sage Track system.Last year, I sent the individualized commendation letters to the supervisors of our 28 outstanding ad hoc reviewers who completed at least two reviews (including reviewing for a revised manuscript), accepted all of our invitations with a perfect score on timeliness in submitting their reviews and review quality. I was very touched when I received this note from Michael Bugeja, Director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication of Iowa State University:Thank you for your gracious letter about Gang Han's professional academic service to JMCQ. As you can see below, we have shared your kind words with the faculty, staff and Advisory Council. Please know how much we appreciate a busy editor and scholar such as yourself taking time out to commend exemplary service. …