The seven deadly sins of communication research

We analyzed anonymized copies of the complete reviewer comments for 120 recent submissions to the Journal of Communication and attempted to identify the scholarly "sins" and "virtues" most frequently mentioned by the reviewers and most closely associated with the decision to publish the submission. We assessed levels of interreviewer agreement and patterns of evaluation in different subfields of communication scholarship. An explicit connection to a clearly identified theoretical corpus and novel findings or perspectives proved to be the most important predictors of publication. We discuss the ramifications of these findings for the current state of communication research.