"Special" Call for Marketing Research Experts

Most marketing scholars treat a Call for Papers as a deadline notice. We treated 225 of them as data.

Here's what we found, and why we need your help to make sense of it.

Special issue CFPs are one of the most underused intelligence sources in academic marketing. They don't just tell you where to submit. They tell you what journal editors think matters right now, what gaps they believe the field needs to fill, which directions they're willing to stake editorial capital on. Unlike published articles (which reflect decisions made 2–3 years ago), a CFP is a forward-looking signal. It's an editorial roadmap.

So we analyzed them. Systematically

The Marketingaroo "ILOVE marketing" Report drew on 225 special issue calls from 62 journals, spanning 2022–2025. We ran co-occurrence analysis, journal tier comparisons, geographic scope analysis, and temporal trend tracking, with multi-coder AI classification and human validation, to map where marketing scholarship is actually heading.

None of this would have been possible without a source most of us rely on without thinking twice: the Marketing Scholars: Call for Papers, Research News and More community on Facebook and LinkedIn. Their tireless curation of CFPs across the field gave us the raw material to make this analysis happen.

What we found became an 8-theme taxonomy:

1. AI & Algorithmic Systems

2. Privacy, Data Governance & Responsible AI

3. Customer Understanding & Behaviour

4. Social Responsibility, Sustainability & Inclusion

5. Organisational Capabilities, Strategy & Collaboration

6. Customer Experience, Service & Relationships

7. Platforms, Channels & Media Strategy

8. Methodology & Research Innovation

The data tells us what editors want. What it can't tell us on its own is what that means for researchers in the trenches: what the gaps look like from the inside, which findings are surprising, and what scholars working in these areas should actually do with this intelligence.

That's where you come in

We're releasing the report theme by theme, and we're looking for expert commentators.

Are you a specialist in one of these nine areas? We want your voice in the report.

Each theme overview will include a short expert commentary (300–500 words) from one or more scholars who work in that space, reflecting on the findings, flagging what surprises them, and offering their take on what the patterns mean for researchers trying to navigate the field.

Your commentary will be:

✔ Featured in the published theme overview on our social media

✔ Included in the final compiled report

✔ Credited with your name, affiliation, and a link to your profile or research

This isn't a peer review exercise. It's an invitation to add your expertise, your perspective, and your voice to a piece of research designed to be genuinely useful to the marketing scholarly community.

If you'd like to contribute, or just want to be the first to see the data for your area, get in touch. 

Drop a comment, send a DM, or email [prof.muravsky@gmail.com].

We'll be releasing the first theme insights shortly. The full series rolls out across the coming months

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The field is moving. The data shows exactly how. Let's make sense of it together.

🦘 Marketingaroo | For marketing academics, by marketing academics.