From the editors: JWR past, present and future

ABSTRACT

The editor and assistant editor consider the past, present and future of the Journal of Wine Research. They contemplate its origins as a unique journal serving those who grow wine, make wine, sell wine and consume wine. They also observe the current state of the journal, and outline where the journal might go in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• The Journal of Wine Research
• Masters of Wine
• Wine Research

JWR: Past

The Journal of Wine Research (JWR) is an unusual scholarly journal in that it does not have the traditional academic history of most learned publications. Its origins were not within some association or society of a discipline such as the American Economic Association (AEA), the British Association of Management (BAM) or the Australia-New Zealand Marketing Academy (ANZMAC), organizations that have subscribed members, and publish journals targeted primarily at these memberships. Neither is JWR merely one of many journals in the stable of a large commercial publishing company which might have identified the need for a journal in a particular field of intellectual endeavor, recruited an editor and editorial board, and then marketed it to academics and other interested audiences within that scholarly community. While JWR is published by a large commercial publishing firm today, its origins lie within the membership of a rather unique society, most of whom are not academics in the traditional sense: The Institute of Masters of Wine. JWR is, indeed, the official journal of the Institute of Masters of Wine.

The Institute of Masters of Wine is the home of true expertise in the world of wine. The Master of Wine assignation is not a formal master’s degree conferred by a university. Rather, it is a qualification that started more than 65 years ago as a series of examinations for those who worked in the UK wine trade. The assignation’s reputation for its rigorous theoretical and practical wine knowledge requirements soon attracted the interest of wine enthusiasts from all over the world, drawn simply by the desire to master their knowledge of wine through a series of rigorous courses, challenging tasting skills and a dissertation on a relevant topic. An undergraduate degree was not a pre-requisite; the main requirement was the enthusiasm and sheer doggedness that a really tough program over a period of time demanded. The Master of Wine is not for the faint hearted. As a friend of the editor, a consumer researcher at an ivy league university with a PhD from a top US school told the editor a few years back when she was pursuing her Master of Wine: ‘Compared to the Master of Wine, my doctoral studies were a walk in the park.’ She wasn’t pursuing the Master of Wine Program for any professional or career reasons, she was simply doing it because she loved wine, loved learning more about it, and most especially, because she relished the challenge. Today, there are 409 MWs based in 30 countries, each making their own contribution to the world of wine.

JWR: Present

JWR is one of a small handful of peer-reviewed journals dedicated to the study of various aspects of wine. The Journal of Wine Economics (JWE), as its name implies, focuses on economics. It is the official publication of the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE), and is dedicated to encouraging and communicating economic research and analyses and exchanging ideas in wine economics. The International Journal of Wine Business Research (IJWBR), the journal of the Association of Wine Business Research, as its name implies, publishes work on all issues related to managing wine-related businesses. It focuses on wine marketing, consumer behavior, economics, business management, wine tourism, human resource management, and hospitality within the wine and other alcoholic beverage industries.

JWR is different from the other two journals in that its remit is far broader – it literally covers anything and everything to do with wine. Papers published in the journal have addressed viticulture, or the growing of wine grapes, including aspects such as plant- and soil science, biology, climatology, and even entomology and mycology. There are also many papers focused on oenology, the science of wine and wine making, and these feature advances in chemical analysis far beyond the grasp of the average wine enthusiast. A third group of papers address wine in the economy at local and international levels, and its role in culture, where the work of sociologists and anthropologists especially, comes to the fore. Finally, the journal also publishes papers on wine business. While some work has addressed issues such as finance, logistics and human resources within the wine industry, nowadays a large number of papers are about the marketing of wine. Many papers focus on wine consumption from a consumer behavior perspective, while others are concerned with the marketing practices of wine vendors.

JWR is certainly holding its own among the three wine journals discussed above. It has the highest SJR number of the three, at .42, with IJWBR at .37 and JWE at .25. The SJR (SCImago Journal Rank SJR) indicator is a measure of the scientific influence of a scholarly journal that accounts for both the number of citations it receives and the importance or prestige of the journals where the citations come from. With regard to the H-index, JWR (H = 30) compares favorably with IJWBR (H = 33), and both far exceed JWE (H = 4). The H-index of a journal is the number of papers (N) in all the papers published that have N or more citations; in other words, of all the papers published in JWR, 30 have currently been cited 30 or more times.

The sheer breadth of topics on which JWR publishes places unique editorial demands on it that are not faced by the other two journals, especially with regard to reviewing and editing. JWE primarily requires experts in the economics of wine to review submissions, and IJWBR needs a slightly broader mix of specialists in marketing, consumer psychology, tourism and hospitality, and management. JWR needs all of those and a lot more: It also requires viticulturists, oenologists, chemists, sociologists, anthropologists and most likely, other disciplines that we haven’t thought of here. No editor can ever hope to be a knowledgeable about all these disciplines.

In order to meet these challenges, JWR has resorted to an editor and assistant editor system. In addition to the two authors of this review, both of whom are marketing scholars, we are fortunate to have three expert assistant editors to serve as curators of submissions to more specialized areas. Belinda Kemp, at Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, looks after all things viticulture and oenological. Albert Caruana, at the University of Malta handles all submissions of a wine business nature. Nic Terblanche, of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, manages submissions dealing with the societal, cultural and economic aspects of wine and its consumption. Thanks to this team and the way it now operates we have been able to reduce the backlog of papers in review and publication considerably. With the approval of the editor, the assistant editors also take the initiative to desk reject papers deemed unsuitable for sending out to double-blind review. A peer-reviewed journal’s most valuable resource is its reviewers’ time. The assistant editors do not want to waste this resource by allocating papers to reviewers that they know will be rejected. Similarly, they do not want to hold up authors’ time waiting to hear the news of the rejection of a paper when the authors might be able to find another outlet for it.

All indicators suggest that JWR is on an upward tangent: Citations per paper have doubled over the past ten years, and the number of non-citable and uncitable documents has decreased considerably. We are also very encouraged by the extent of international collaboration that is apparent in our authorship: whereas the degree of international collaboration was around 15% in 2000, by 2019 just under 40% of the papers published in JWR were as the result of international collaboration.

JWR: Future

Anyone who has ever attended a ‘Meet the Editors’ session at an academic conference will by now have realized that most editors, regardless of the journal they represent, all say the same thing: ‘Send us your best work.’ No one has ever heard an editor implore an audience of scholars to submit their ‘not so good’ work. Editors need submissions, not only to sustain the journal, but also because most publishers set page budgets for each journal issue, and if the editor of a journal consistently missed those page budgets, the journal would eventually die. So, it is logical that editors seek good numbers of really good submissions. At these ‘Meet the Editors’ sessions most editors then go on to provide guidance in detail to prospective authors about what they seek in papers, and how authors can boost their chances of eventual acceptance by following certain guidelines.

We do the opposite in what follows. Rather than provide direction on what authors can do to increase their chances of acceptance of submission to JWR, here we point out what not to do. By avoiding these pitfalls, authors can increase their chances of a smooth ride through the review process, and hopefully reach their destination of acceptance in JWR. These are the kinds of papers that will likely result in desk rejection, and even if they make it past that stage, to rejection by reviewers:

Limited studies – with little relevance

JWR receives a number of papers that are very limited in scope and that are of little relevance to wine scholars and wine industry practitioners. These studies simply describe a very particular phenomenon, employ small samples from which it is difficult to generalize, and are often situated in such a specific geography or situation that they would be of little interest to the great majority of readers. A fictitious (but frequently encountered!) example of such a submission would be a paper entitled, ‘Consumption of sweet blackberry wine by young consumers in the southern suburbs of X (a city) in the nation of Y (a country).’ There are just so many questions to be asked of such a submission, but the most important reasons for desk (or after review) rejection would be: Why sweet blackberry wine? It’s not even from vitis vinifera and why is the consumption thereof interesting and important and to whom? Why young consumers? Are they different from other consumers in an interesting way or was this perhaps just a convenient student sample? Why the southern suburbs of a city, and not all the suburbs? Why that particular city, is it different from others? And of course, why that particular country? Is it very different from other countries? The most important question of all, is why would anyone care about such a study?

A poorly written paper

JWR receives many papers that are poorly written: Lots of typos, spelling and grammatical errors, poor referencing and not following the style of the journal. We especially appreciate and admire authors who are writing in a language other than their first, but the fact is that JWR is an English language journal. As editors we are not translators and neither are our reviewers. A poorly written paper creates a bad first impression, and reviewers who have to spend unnecessary time trying to make sense of a submission will be far more likely to reject it. The poor writing might just be hiding gems and pearls of wisdom, but reviewers might not be able to find them. As editors and reviewers not only are we not translators, we are also not copy editors. If an author has the slightest doubt that their written work might in any way be lacking, they would be well advised to employ the services of a professional copy editor.

In addition to the provided direction about what not to do, we include some direction here about what to do to increase the chances of acceptance at JWR.

Patience and politeness

This piece of advice is not only relevant to JWR, it is relevant to all other peer-reviewed journals: Be patient and be polite. Understandably, waiting a long time for a decision on a submission can be tedious and frustrating, particularly when that result can take months to eventuate. Remember, however, that neither editors, assistant editors or reviewers, are paid for the work they do for this or indeed most other academic journals. They generally do this type of work because of deep interest in the advancement of knowledge in the field, and as a way of contributing to the broader academic community of which they are a part. They also mostly have fulltime jobs, usually in academia, that involve their own research, teaching and other service. Reviewing tasks have to fit into work schedules and personal lives.

So, when corresponding with the editors of this, and indeed all other journals, be patient: Wait a while, rather than just two or three weeks before firing off that email inquiring about the review status of your submission. Be courteous in your correspondence not only in your communication with editors and editorial assistants, but in your responses to reviewers. You might think that decisions are unfair or unkind, and you might think that a particular reviewer (usually R2 according to the old joke) is an idiot. It really doesn’t help your case to point this out bluntly. Like everyone else we respond to others in the same way they treat us. A little patience and politeness goes a long way.

Reviewing

Don’t turn down invitations to review. If you are happy to submit to a journal, you should also be happy to accept invitations to review for that journal. Journals are like communities and only work effectively when there is give as well as take; they wouldn’t last long if everyone was happy to submit, but not to review. Obviously, editors and assistant editors are objective and try to be fair and truly excellent papers with positive recommendations through the review process will inevitably get published. But when it comes to a close call on a paper that might have one reviewer recommending outright rejection and another suggesting possible acceptance, the editor’s final decision might indeed by influenced by their memory of an author who accepted, or chose not to accept a previous invitation to review a paper. We’re only human after all.

We always need good reviewers. If you are willing and interested, you are always welcome to contact the editor or one of the assistant editors. Be a part of the JWR community if you are interested in wine and want to write about it.

Conclusion

A bibliometric review of the journal by Paschen and her colleagues (2015) provided an excellent picture of the current state of the journal. Healthy as it was at the time, the paper in this issue by Lam et al. (2020) provides a bibliographic overview that not only sheds light on citations, author impact and collaboration networks, but also indicates that the journal has moved on very effectively and successfully since then. In an inaugural editorial (Pitt, 2017) it was noted just how fortunate we were to be able to study, write and read about, and not least, enjoy, such a magical product. As the psalmist tells us, wine doth indeed ‘maketh glad the heart of man.’ We look forward to growing and progressing the journal, and so, to parrot just about every other journal editor who has talked about their journal before: Send us your best work! We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s ).