“Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40!” The Journal of Consumer Research Reaches a Milestone

Abstract

Abstract The Journal of Consumer Research has completed four decades as one of the top journals in the larger field of marketing as well as the premier outlet for research on consumer behavior. This elite status is based, in part, on its stated objective as a multidisciplinary journal that allows for a variety of topics, methods, and populations that are central to collectives of scholars from many social sciences and methodological orientations. While a few articles have reviewed the level of diversity within the journal and among its peers, none to date has taken an expansive look at what is studied, how it is examined, and which consumers are used to determine the validity of our theoretical contributions. Thus this article looks across the life span of JCR to address these issues and finds considerable progress along with major areas that should be addressed by the community of researchers that constitutes our field.