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This study builds on previous discussion of an important area for both academics and academic journals – the issue of reviewers inappropriately asking for (or “coercing”) citation of their own work. That situation creates an opportunity for (hopefully a small number of) academics to engage in unethical behaviour, often with the goal of increasing their citation count. This study aims to draw attention to this often-overlooked issue, critically considering potential reviewer motivations and offering possible remedies.

This study reviews literature and critically discusses this issue, offering a typology for coercive citation suggestions and sharing previously unpublished commentary from Editors of leading journals.

This study provides a typology of reviewer motivations for coercing citations, suggests potential remedies and considers the positive and negative impacts of these suggestions.

This study identifies an area known from multiple discussions to be important to academics and Editors, where many want changes in journals’ practices. In response, this study provides recommendations for easy changes that would decrease the opportunity for unethical behaviour by reviewers and also, for some journals, improve the quality of reviews.

As online reviews have become a potent marketing tool, the underlying motivation has come into question. Focus has shifted towards assessing reviewer credibility before appraising online review credibility. Guided by source credibility theory, this study investigates the effect of reviewers’ historical ratings on review helpfulness to gain insight into the role of reviewer credibility.

We explore readers’ underlying psychological processes using web data analysis (Study 1) and experiments (Study 2). Study 1 empirically examines the effect of reviewers’ historical ratings on review helpfulness using 100,621 reviews authored by 890 TripAdvisor reviewers. Study 2 involves two experiments with 328 participants to scrutinize the readers’ underlying mechanisms in establishing reviewer credibility, with a specific focus on the effect of reviewers’ historical ratings.

When a reviewer’s historical ratings are predominantly extreme, readers perceive the reviewer as less credible, leading to decreased helpfulness in reviews authored by that reviewer. Interestingly, high negativity in historical ratings does not have a significant effect on either reviewer credibility or review helpfulness.

This study offers two significant contributions to the existing literature. First, it extends previous research on review helpfulness by incorporating reviewers’ historical rating behavior. This provides a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence the perceived usefulness of reviews. Second, it integrates two distinct research methods: TripAdvisor web data analysis and experiments. This methodological synthesis enhances the robustness of the study by offering a more nuanced and well-rounded perspective on the dynamics between reviewers’ historical ratings and perceived helpfulness of reviews.

The purpose of this viewpoint is to spotlight the role of reviewers within the collaborative triad of academic publishing. It argues that the significance of reviewers is often disregarded, leading to a gap in our understanding of the peer review process. This perspective emphasizes reviewers as unsung heroes in the publishing ecosystem, providing intentional and thought-provoking insights into the less-discussed yet impactful developments in the evolving peer review landscape.

Leveraging the author’s distinguished background as a recipient of the Journal of Service Marketing Outstanding Reviewer Award, this paper offers a personal reflection and synthesised viewpoints on the peer review process. Serving as a representative voice for reviewers, it provides insightful perspectives from the vantage point of a peer reviewer, diverging from conventional editorials and commentaries authored by editors.

Acknowledging the shrinking reviewer pool, this viewpoint suggests a mandatory “review for review” system alongside incentives like editorial positions, while considering financial rewards for reviewers. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in review prompts ethical concerns but offers solutions for handling diverse submissions and dealing with “Reviewer 2.” While embracing open review for its transparency, potential pitfalls surrounding article confidence and copyright require attention. Ultimately, this viewpoint advocates for a collaborative approach, valuing reviewers, exploring innovative solutions, navigating ethical dilemmas in the technological age and implementing transparent practices responsibly for the betterment of scholarly discourse.

This viewpoint highlights the invaluable contributions of reviewers, enriching the scholarly community and promoting intellectual growth.

The role of everyday citizens in the production of knowledge has become central to the study of media sociology. This interest is fueled by the growth of information communication technologies that have made it easier for amateurs to produce and disseminate content. The world of book reviewing – an exemplar of a field transformed by digitalization – concerns about the rise of amateurs manifests in the grievance that, “Nowadays, everyone’s a critic.” This chapter empirically investigates this idea by asking: Who is qualified to be a reviewer? The chapter draws on in-depth interviews with review editors, critics, and bloggers who have successfully crossed over to publish in some of the most important outlets in the English-publishing field. Analysis reveals that openness is central to ideas of what qualifies someone to be a book reviewer and how reviewers subsequently get work. Openness, however, is an example of noncertifiable skills, which are ascertained primarily through informal methods such as turning toward one’s personal and professional networks for recommendations from peers or relying on personal face-to-face encounters. A practical consequence of this selection criterion is that only reviewers who are known to book review editors in this specific way (i.e., their tastes and esthetic openness) are eligible candidates for professional review assignments. In this way, the commitment to openness as a professional value among book reviewers actually operates as a mechanism of closing their occupational boundaries.

Prior research suggests that perceived levels of a subordinate auditor’s competence affects audit reviewers’ judgments. We extend this line of research by investigating the effects of perceived client competence (hereafter, ClientComp) and its interaction with subordinate auditor’s competence (hereafter, AuditorComp) on audit reviewers’ judgments. Using data from highly experienced CPA audit managers, senior managers, and partners, we find a significant main effect for AuditorComp, but not for ClientComp. We also find that when AuditorComp is high, levels of ClientComp do not affect audit reviewers’ judgments. However, we cannot support the hypothesis that when AuditorComp is low ClientComp will significantly affect audit reviewers’ judgments. These mixed results suggest that in the post-SOX (2002) era regulatory environment, audit reviewers may be exercising heightened professional skepticism about ClientComp whenever they consider clients’ assertions.

Based on self-determination theory (SDT), this study aims to determine the motivation factors of reviewers writing long reviews in the anime industry.

This study analyzes 171,188 online review data collected from an online anime community (MyAnimeList.net).

The findings show that intensity of emotions, experience in writing reviews and helpful votes in past reviews are the most important factors and positively influence review length. The overall rating of the anime moderates the effects of some motivation factors. Moreover, reviewers commenting on their favorite or nonfavorite anime also have varied motivation factors. Furthermore, this study has addressed the p-value problem due to the large sample size.

This study provides a comprehensive and theoretical understanding of reviewers' motivation for writing long reviews.

Online communities can incorporate the insights from this study into website design and motivate reviewers to write long reviews.

Many past studies have investigated what reviews are more helpful. Review length is the most important factor of review helpfulness and positively affects it. However, few studies have examined the determinants of review length. This study attempts to address this issue.

The study examines the potential moderating effects of repeating purchase cues and product knowledge on the relationship between the varying consistency of the review set and causal attribution. This study also investigates how causal attribution correlates with the perceived misleadingness of the review set.

A scenario-based experiment was conducted with 170 participants to explore the relationship between the consistency of the review set and causal attribution and how repeating purchase cues and product knowledge moderates this relationship.

Findings suggest that inconsistent review sets lead to more product (vs reviewer) attribution than consistent review sets. The repeating purchase cues mitigate the negative relationship between the consistency of the review set and product attribution, whereas product knowledge mitigates the positive relationship between the consistency of the review set and reviewer attribution. Furthermore, the results indicate that high product attribution and low reviewer attribution are associated with low perceived misleadingness.

This study is novel because it examines the moderating effects of repeating purchase cues and product knowledge on the relationship between the consistency of the review set and causal attribution. It adds to the literature by shedding light on the causal attribution process underlying the formation of perceived misleadingness of online reviews. The findings of this study provide valuable insights for managers on how to enhance the positive effects of consistent review sets and mitigate the negative effects of inconsistent review sets.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the author’s experience related to several attempts of getting approved a paper of their authorship about gender and organizations by the lens of a researcher trying to meet his goal.

Throughout the endeavor, the author received substantial feedback and evaluations from editors and reviewers that allowed him to understand better the motivation of those that are dedicated to carry out such task; enhance his work whenever was possible; increase his resilience and self-motivation; and identify several inconsistencies of the peer-review process. Furthermore, that ample opinionated material allowed him to conduct the current autoethnographic study.

Accordingly, the author’s findings identified three aggregate dimensions, namely, demotivating assessments, mixed perceptions and motivating assessments. Moreover, the author did not identify any trace of developmental review (help), bill of rights or notion of being an “artist,” as some scholars suggest, from both the reviewers’ or editors’ part, but only from a specific journal’s editor and one of its reviewers. On the one hand, the majority of the reviewers/editors showed a harsh view about the author’s work or even a lack of interest to ponder his arguments and difficulties to carry out that study. Even though the author alluded to the limitations and unsurmountable hurdles that he faced along the way, they showed neither sympathy nor comprehension to his comments. On the other hand, it was not an easy task to the author to sift the hints provided by them.

Nonetheless, the author also recognizes his own limitations that eventually affected his analysis and point of views. It is also worth noting that this method relies on a unique source (the author).

The author believes that his ideas and opinions have some base and merit. Rather, his findings embrace profound implications for reviewers and editors, particularly in terms of how they perform their work.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first endeavor focusing on peer-review system related to organizational studies and grounded in an autoethnography approach. Therefore, their contribution is derived from a researcher that is familiar with the system and its flaws.

The purpose of this study is to present a methodology for enhancing the quality and usefulness of online reviews for prospective customers to investigate how this contemporary form of instrumental support can be facilitated to strengthen customer-to-customer support.

This study develops an analytics framework with applications of machine learning models using customer review data from Amazon.com. Linear regression is commonly used for review helpfulness and sales prediction. In this study, Random Forest model is applied because of its strong performance and reliability. To advance the methodology, a custom script in Python is created to generate Partial Dependence Plots for intensive exploration of the dependency interpretations of review helpfulness and sales. The authors also apply K-Means to cluster reviewers and use the results to generate reviewer qualification scores and collective reviewer scores, which are incorporated into the review facilitation process.

The authors find the average helpfulness ratio of the reviewer as the most important determinant of reviewer qualification. The collective reviewer qualification for a product created based on reviewers’ characteristics is found important to customers’ purchase intentions and can be used as a metric for product comparison.

The findings of this study suggest that service improvement efforts can be performed by developing software applications to monitor reviewer qualifications dynamically, bestowing a badge to top quality reviewers, redesigning review sorting interfaces and displaying the consumer rating distribution on the product page, resulting in improved information reliability and consumer trust.

This study adds to the research on customer-to-customer support in the service literature. As customer reviews perform as a contemporary form of instrumental support, the authors validate the determinants of review helpfulness and perform an intensive exploration of its dependency interpretation. Reviewer qualification and the collective reviewer qualification scores are generated as new predictors and incorporated into the helpfulness-based review facilitation services.