What is 'Digital first' publication?
15 February 2013

We are starting to publish a selection of papers on the website before they appear in the printed version of IJMR, giving IJMR readers new content monthly instead of six times a year.

This means that readers will receive content more frequently, and it will be more timely, as the elapsed time from acceptance to publication will be reduced. 

I hope that prospective authors will also appreciate this change. Eventually, all papers published in the print version will have appeared on the website before appearing in the printed journal, so we hope the website will play an increasingly important role in leading conversation around developments in research methods.

To launch the new website, we are publishing two newly accepted papers. 

In the first, ‘Let their fingers do the talking? Using the Implicit Association Test in Market Research’ Aiden Gregg (University of Southampton), James Klymowsky, Alex Perryman & Dominic Owens (Seven Stones UK), explore the potential for using indirect methods in research to reduce the bias inherent in self reporting (and see this quarter’s ‘classic’ paper by Durrant & Simmons on the fallibility of memory), specifically the Implicit Association Test (AIT). 

The authors discuss the potential for bias in direct questioning methods, such as socially desirable answers, self-deception and inability to provide insights into own behaviour, and the resulting disconnect between explicit and implicit (concealed) attitudes. As the authors describe, IAT measures response times to stimulus ( text, pictures etc.) presented in blocks with differing configurations, such as cheap v expensive; better v worse; safe v risky to compare attitudes towards competing brands. The method can be used face-to-face, especially in qualitative research, and online. 

The advantages of the method are described, citing evidence from published research studies, and how IAT can be utilised in market research, for example to help differentiate brands, identifying intangible brand values and segmenting consumers. The disadvantages are also discussed, such as creating the alternative factors - this v that; elapsed time to conduct sufficient tests and ensuring salience symmetry for the blocks of stimuli. Finally, the authors describe their research utilising IAT in pharmaceutical research.

The second paper, ‘Distortions in retrospective word-of-mouth measurement’, Robert East (Kingston University), Mark Uncles (U. of New South Wales), Jenni Romaniuk (U. of S. Australia) and Chris Hand (Kingston U.), explores the impact on word-of-mouth (WOM) of the interval between an experience and reporting it. The authors argue that measures of negative (NWOM) v positive (PWOM) attitudes, and the volume of comments, could be affected by this time interval and therefore impact on comparative data collected at different intervals. 

They also discuss the telescoping effect, where over time an older experience remains more prominent than recent experiences. Two hypotheses were devised for the test: do recalled PWOM and NWON volumes change as the interval increases; does the ratio of the recalled volumes of PWOM to NWOM change over time. 

The research, conducted in the restaurant and fashion store sectors in the UK, is fully described, including the questions used to measure WOM. The findings indicate that time interval does not appear to create significant changes in reported data, but the authors call for more research in this field to help confirm their findings.