Serving the Marketing Discipline Through Journal Reviews.

There are three primary customers for a manuscript review: the journal editor, manuscript authors, and the marketing discipline. A reviewer can go to any of several articles for guidelines on how to serve the needs of an editor and authors. This article focuses on thoughts about the marketing discipline-as-customer for scholarly journal reviewers. The most important motivation for devoting time and energy to journal reviewing lies in the opportunity to meet the marketing discipline's need for growth in and usefulness of the body of marketing knowledge. The author believes that the discipline needs more effort devoted to generating its own theories of marketing phenomena. A second, more complicated example concerns the marketing discipline's need for rigorous research, regardless of the approach used in the research on which a manuscript reports. The most controversial example comes from reviewing manuscripts that rely on a literature-driven methodology to generate theory. Such manuscripts typically use literature references and logic to derive theoretical propositions or hypotheses about a phenomenon. When a reviewer believes that a discipline-as-customer issue is important, the review should comment on it.