July 12, 2013
Jarvis earns honor for manuscript review work
CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Cheryl Burke Jarvis, professor and chair of the marketing department at Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s College of Business, is the 2013 Reviewer of the Year for the “Journal of Service Research.”
The award announcement took place at the international Frontiers in Service Conference in Taipei, Taiwan, earlier this month.
Jarvis, who is also a research faculty fellow with the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University, has served as a reviewer for numerous major marketing journals and conferences during the past 15 years. She concluded an eight-year term on the editorial board of the “Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science” last fall.
The editor of the “Journal of Service Research” selects the winner of the Reviewer of the Year award on the basis of the number, quality and timeliness of reviews submitted. Jarvis reviews an average of three to four manuscripts each month for various journals including about six each year for the “Journal of Service Research.”
Typically, three or four reviewers, in addition to the editor, review each manuscript and that determines if a manuscript will be rejected or approved for revision and re-submission. It is common for each chosen manuscript to undergo one, two or even more revisions and re-reviews. It is a double-blind peer review process and all work is done on a volunteer basis.
“Reviewing manuscripts for academic publications is one of the most challenging, but also most rewarding, activities of a research faculty member,” Jarvis said. “I read through the entire manuscript several times, trying to understand and evaluate everything from the contribution of the research to our extant body of knowledge in the field, to the quality of the logic and evidence used to develop and defend the authors’ theoretical model and hypotheses, to the appropriateness of the research design and statistical analysis used to answer the research questions, to the implication of the study’s findings to managerial practice.”
She notes that reading and evaluating the lengthy manuscripts is time-consuming as is her work producing the pages of detailed notes for the authors and editors identifying questions pertaining to the manuscript and highlighting its strengths and weaknesses. She said her review work has helped improve her own research, because she learns something new from every manuscript she reads and as a researcher and author herself, she has seen the positive effect reviewers have had on her journal submissions.