History of JAR policies
History of Conflict of Interest Policies (COI) at JAR
Until the editorial regime that started in 2011, JAR did not have a stated formal policy. The then-new editors developed a policy for “internal submissions” that was posted by the end of 2012.
Starting in 2015, the journal introduced the guest editors who were asked to handle “internal submissions” by Chicago faculty or Ph.D. students.
In 2016, JAR started requiring the disclosure of potential conflicts of interests by authors to the editors as well as in the manuscript. Accordingly, we updated the Scholar One site requiring authors to disclose their conflicts of interest upon submission.
With the appointment of the three non-Chicago editors in 2019, the journal introduced the notion of “home school submissions” and announced the respective policy on its website. In addition, we revised the wording of the COI disclosure policy and explicitly stated our longer-standing policy that senior and associate editors do their best to avoid conflicts of interest in handling manuscripts as well as when assigning manuscripts for review. We also stated the expectation that associate editors and reviewers disclose their conflicts to the senior editors.
At the end of 2021, we updated the Home School policy.
The journal has always distinguished between regular manuscripts and survey or review papers that JAR invited from time to time. The latter papers naturally follow a different process. Initially, this distinction was made informally. Starting in 2023, we have formalized this distinction and also issued an open call for surveys and methodological reviews. To clarify the distinction, the new policy was posted in early in 2024 when we updated all our policies on the website. In addition, published papers now state explicitly when they have been accepted under the “surveys and methods track.”
The current policies are available on the . The policies begin with the initial submission.