In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor’s Preface
  • Brad Schultz, Editor

Earlier this year I received an e-mail invitation to the International Symposium on Peer Reviewing. I didn’t go (thanks to my kids I’ve had my fill of Orlando), but the sobering statistics that came with the invitation got me thinking. Apparently, only 8% of the Scientific Research Society believes that peer review works well (Chubin & Hackett, 1990), while other research called it “a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance” (Rothwell & Martyn, 2000).

Despite the somewhat old data, I don’t disagree. Peer review can be a very subjective process in which reviewers’ feelings, prejudices and emotions get in the way. Maybe on the day the reviewer sat down to read the paper the kids were home sick, dinner got burned and he or she had a fight with the spouse. Professional jealousy may also come into play; I have heard stories of reviewers rejecting papers because they were not cited in the literature review. Finally, I believe that something of an ‘old boy’ clique has developed in research, with the same people and agendas continually promoted.

It’s important for researchers who contribute to JSM to know that we are doing everything possible to deal with these issues. To be sure, there will always be a certain amount of subjectivity in the process because we are dealing with human beings. But if you submit a paper to JSM you can be assured that— [End Page vii]

  1. 1. The paper will be reviewed by at least 3 scholars knowledgeable with the topic and approach. If the comments of the reviewers are wildly divergent I will go over the paper again myself and if necessary send it out to yet another reviewer for a clean look. That means up to 5 people are reviewing your work. The more people who review the more consistent result we get.

  2. 2. The paper will be double-blind reviewed. Double-blind means the reviewers don’t know the name of the person who submitted the paper, and vice versa. Rest assured, JSM will not compromise this most basic rule for reviewing.

  3. 3. Our reviewers are highly qualified in their fields of sports media. Some of the reviewers are seminal figures in sports scholarship; all of them have made sports research the focus of their scholarly work.

  4. 4. The reviews of your work will be professional and offer constructive criticism. I not only go through each review to make sure that the comments are helpful in terms of making the research better, but I also look to make sure the review is not personally demeaning. I can honestly say that our reviews have been completely professional and I have not had to edit them in any substantial way.

  5. 5. JSM encourages new authors and scholars. Since we essentially created this journal out of nothing there was no agenda to protect; no network of colleagues to promote. We have had a couple of our editorial board members publish papers, but each time the author went through the process described above. In some instances, board members have submitted papers that failed to qualify for publication. The last few issues of JSM have included work from relatively new scholars in the field, and we pride ourselves on being open to anyone who wants to contribute. The only thing that matters here is publishing the best possible research on sports media—period. [End Page viii]

On that subject, we believe our research this month is once again strong. We did not purposefully set out to have most of our research on football, but it seems fitting given the season of the year. Trent Seltzer and Michael Mitrook offer a study on framed media coverage of the Heisman Trophy race. The timing of the story is somewhat ironic in that the Rocky Mountain News Heisman poll, which ran for 22 years and which the authors used extensively in their research, no longer exists because the newspaper folded in February after 150 years of publication—another casualty of the economy and the newspaper crisis. Seltzer and Mitrook correctly noted the accuracy of the RMN Heisman poll, but interestingly...

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