More Options for Authors: Expanding the Paper Formats Considered at JCR

Abstract

As of January 1, 2025, the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) will consider submissions in two additional formats: Registered Reports and Brief Commentaries. REGISTERED REPORTS Registered Reports are empirical papers that go through the entire review process prior to collecting the final data, which is then collected and analyzed, after a conditional acceptance. Registered Reports should be written similarly to typical empirical papers, proposing a theoretical or practical contribution, situating that contribution in the research literature, describing the full research and data analysis design in detail, and explaining precisely how the results will be interpreted and mapped to conclusions. Such submissions would receive a full evaluation during the review process, including potential revisions. To be successful, a Registered Report must make a convincing case that the final paper will make a JCR -worthy contribution regardless of how the results turn out. For this reason, Registered Reports are most commonly used when a case can be made for a two-sided hypothesis or for a test between competing theories. This would not be a good format for speculative research questions, where some set of empirical outcomes would fail to be informative. Registered Report submissions do have the option of providing pilot data to establish that the conditions for a meaningful test are likely to be met. However, all data collected prior to conditional acceptance will be reported in an appendix and the final paper should be based only on data collected and analyzed as specified in the accepted draft.