How to Get Published in the Journal of Advertising: Tips from the Inside

Publishing in top-tier journals is arguably an important step to getting a good job and tenure, but competition is steep. For example, the Journal of Advertising (JA) had a record number of 640 submissions in 2020 with acceptance rates around 12%.

Subsequently, a common question authors are likely to ask is: How do I get published in JA?

Although there is no “silver bullet” to writing a high-quality submission, there are some tangible steps authors can take to improve submissions to JA and better navigate the peer review process toward a successful publication.

While there are many good resources on publishing tips available to authors, many fewer resources are devoted specifically to getting published in JA.

Authors need to be aware of the criteria for submission and review of articles at JA. For example, authors may select from three article formats—Original Research Articles, Literature Reviews, and Research Notes—each with its own set of criteria.

The aim of this editorial is to provide authors with some tangible steps they can take to improve their submissions and put themselves in a better position for getting published at JA.

“Hot Button” Issues to Watch

To assist authors, we’ve developed a “hot button” checklist, shown in Table 1. The term “hot button” refers to issues that usually prompt immediate and intense reactions from reviewers. The checklist applies to all article formats noted and is organized around five main obstacles based on our observations.

Table 1. “Hot button” checklist in preparing submissions for JA.

1. Introduction

—Is clear and precise in its organization

—Presents as complete a picture as possible

—Makes clear the motivation of the study

—Shows the reader that you understand the research problem

—Provides clear, concise, and compelling statement of purpose and/or study’s goals

2. Study’s contribution

—Meets JA’s primary Aims and Scope (i.e., shows the reader how the study contributes “to the development of advertising theory and its relationship to practice”)

—If the study develops a new method or model, explains how that performs better than existing ones

—If the study identifies evidence-based moderating/mediating variables, explains how or why these are useful in understanding how advertising functions

3. Literature review or conceptual framework

—Situates the research problem within the broader advertising literature

—Checks existing advertising literature on the given topic

—Shows the reader that you grasp existing discrepancies in the advertising literature

—Ensures that the literature review or conceptual framework enhances and informs the rest of the study

4. Hypotheses/research questions

—Explains how your hypotheses/research questions generate novel insights

—Shows how these insights are derived from the literature review or conceptual framework

5. Study’s benefits

—Explains how or why the study is a relevant and timely problem

—Ensures rigor at every step (conceptual, empirical, analytical)

—Provides substantive insights and findings that add to advertising knowledge

—Shows how findings help to close a gap in the advertising literature

—Tells how the research will help to further the field of advertising

Authors can use the “hot button” checklist when submitting their work to JA. This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor does the list cover every stage of the review process. For example, the revise and resubmit stage is not specifically covered by the checklist. Nonetheless, it is assumed that even revise and resubmit papers can benefit from the checklist.

Below, section/associate editors Cristel Russell and Jameson Hayes provide some additional tips specifically geared toward the recently unveiled Literature Reviews and Research Notes sections.

Five Key Ingredients for Literature Reviews

By Cristel Antonia Russell

There comes a time when sufficient research has been conducted on a given topic that a review of the extant knowledge is warranted or when new developments in advertising practice or the media/advertising environment signal the need for mapping out the current terrain. A systematic review of research in a given area makes sense of extant research and connects sometimes disparate pieces into a coherent whole. This exercise inevitably identifies knowledge gaps that become starting points for further research.

In other words, review papers intersect past, present, and future by providing a holistic, integrative, and critical synthesis of past research to stimulate future research directions. Such papers organize and enable linkages across a wide body of past research to distill useful insights that show present gaps and opportunities in the domain of inquiry and, on this basis, propose ways to extend the knowledge base and guide future research to further our understanding of advertising theory and practice.

Thus, a good review should have the following ingredients:

1. A critical summary/synthesis of past research on a topic or domain of interest

2. A critical identification of present biases or knowledge gaps in the literature to date

3. Propositions for future research directions (in the form of recommendations or research agenda)

The scope of a review must be just right. The domain of focus must have enough substance to be distillable: too narrow and there will be too few studies; too broad and it will become unwieldy. A domain of inquiry is ripe for a review when it is mature, often with decades of research on the topic (e.g., emotional appeals in advertising: Pozharliev, Verbeke, and Bagozzi 2017; Poels and Dewitte 2019; celebrity endorsement: Carrillat and Ilicic 2019; or sponsorship: Cornwell 2019). An equally fruitful avenue for a review is an emerging topic, fueled by a growing concern in society, such as online privacy, security, and safety (Boerman, Kruikemeier, and Zuiderveen Borgesius 2017). Reviews of emerging topics may focus less on past findings but conceptually organize concepts or applications and identify present gaps and opportunities for future research (see, e.g., recent reviews of augmented reality: de Ruyter et al. 2020; social media: Voorveld 2019; or media multitasking: Segijn and Eisend 2019; Duff and Segijn 2019). Another way to carve out a review domain is to intersect advertising with another domain such as public policy (Kees and Andrews 2019) or technology (Liu-Thompkins 2019).

The last two ingredients are the common link among all the above articles:

1. Critical: A review article cannot be purely descriptive; it must synthesize extant knowledge and extend it in a meaningful and theoretically novel way, along with scholarly and applied implications for advertising.

2. Organized: A review must be systematically conducted and reported. There are many methodological options available. For instance, this issue includes two excellent examples: a bibliometric analysis of influencer marketing (Ye et al. 2021) and a meta-analysis of advergame effects (van Berlo et al., 2020). Regardless of methodological choices, review articles are anchored on an organizing framework so that the linkages between pieces of the literature connect into a coherent whole. Visuals can help show intersections between bodies of research or facets of a given phenomenon (e.g., the conceptual review of product placement in Russell 2019).

In conclusion, a well-conducted conceptual review is a stimulant. It should tell us (critically and in an organized fashion) what has been done and where things are currently, including what is missing and what remains to be done.

Criteria and Tips for Research Notes

By Jameson Hayes

The Research Notes section is another initiative enacted by JA in order to continue advancing the field forward (Rodgers 2020). Research Notes provide an outlet for new, novel, unique, or time-sensitive research on emerging issues, topics, theories, or methods deserving of scholarly attention. The section features high-quality, cutting-edge papers in a shorter format (6,000 words maximum) to facilitate timely publication. To qualify as a Research Note, submissions must meet at least one of five criteria.

1. Novel and interesting empirical findings on an emerging topic (e.g., see Beuckels et al.’s discovery in this issue of JA that, contrary to prior belief, children begin media multitasking at a very young age, and this has an impact on their response to advertising).

2. Unusual or conflicting empirical findings that may refute commonly held beliefs or theory (e.g., see how de Gregorio and Windels (2021) juxtapose two theoretical predictions in refuting prevailing wisdom that creatives are more creative than noncreatives in advertising agencies).

3. Theoretical insights with or without empirical research that may open up a new research stream (e.g., see Hoeken, Hornikx, and Linders’ (2020) use of normative criteria used to examine the theoretical premise of argument quality and the persuasive process).

4. A topic or an issue that emerges in practice but has not been addressed in the academic literature (e.g., advertising studied in connection to client resource deployment (Vafeas 2021), paternal impact on children’s ad responses (Cowart 2020), and health promotion to Hispanic consumers (Garcia-Collart, Serin, and Sinha 2020).

5. Creative and innovative research method(s) tested and reported for wider diffusion (e.g., see proposed approach of Callejo et al. (2020) to tracking low-quality and fraudulent display advertising impressions by embedding JavaScript code into the ad).

The following “tips” are also offered to assist authors in identifying and overcoming common issues observed in Research Note submissions.

• Tip #1: Establish how the research meets at least one of the five noted criteria above. A primary task for reviewers and members of the editorial team is to ensure that assessed manuscripts are appropriate for the format. Integrating details that speak to criteria will help to alleviate ambiguity in terms of fit.

• Tip #2: Delineate the theoretical contribution of the Research Note early on in the paper. JA is devoted to publishing advertising research that has theoretical and practical impact. While the time-sensitive nature of Research Notes topics and the shorter format may preclude extensive theoretical development found in Original Research Articles, a theoretical contribution is still necessary in Research Notes. For theory-driven research employing well-established theory, authors are advised to focus on key theoretical points directly applicable to the manuscript while pointing readers to useful sources for more extensive reviews of the theory. For exploratory research on emerging topics, authors may opt to use existing theory to make sense of results or propose a new theory or model based on results.

• Tip #3: Ensure that the Research Note format fits the scope of the research. Often, submitted manuscripts propose new and unique concepts and ideas that align with criteria; however, the concepts or idea can sometimes be too big to adequately be encapsulated within a Research Note. New concepts must be fully explicated, theoretically, and differentiated from existing related concepts. This task might prove too difficult to accomplish in 6,000 words. In these cases, authors are advised to err on the side of caution and opt to submit a more developed paper as an Original Research Article.

In conclusion, successful Research Notes submissions offer novel or unique theoretical, practical, and/or methodological insights into emerging topics immediately relevant to the field. It is, therefore, paramount that Research Notes submissions explain why or how the research meets the criteria while ensuring that the format is appropriate for the goals of the research.

Closing Remarks

Between rising submissions and rejection rates at top-tier journals, it is important that authors use every resource at their disposal to produce high-quality submissions. We have tried to distill some tangible steps authors can and should take to improve submissions geared toward paper formats offered at JA. For example, authors are free to use our “hot button” checklist for all paper formats, as well as the provided tips for Literature Reviews and Research Notes, in preparing submissions for JA.