Growth and continuity at APJM

Abstract

These are auspicious times for the Asia Pacific Journal of Management (APJM).Over the last decade or so APJM has firmly established itself as the leading generalmanagement journal focused upon Asian organizations and their relationship to theglobal economy. All indicators point to continuing growth and development: sub-missions to the journal have doubled over the past 3 years from 345 in 2009 to over700 in 2012. Readership, as measured by full text downloads, has increased dramat-ically from some 66,000 in 2008 to almost 120,000 downloads in 2011. Moreover,this readership is geographically diverse, in percentage terms the readership is veryhealthy in the UK (which accounts for 14 % of full text downloads), followed byChina (13 %), Australia (10 %), the USA (9 %), and Germany (6 %). Since its recentinclusion in the Social Sciences Citation Index, APJM has received two very respect-able impact factors: 3.35 in 2010 (reported in 2011) and 3.06 in 2011 (reported in2012). These impact factors rank us in the top 20 management journals worldwideand the first among all management journals with a declared regional focus. All ofthese are very encouraging. I can say I am delighted to begin my term as APJM’sEditor-in-Chief in this journal’s 31st year of publication.At the beginning of this century the newly appointed Editor-in-Chief, KulwantSingh (National University of Singapore), set out to raise the journal’s profile byinternationalizing its editorship, authorship, and readership. Each of the followingthree Editors-in-Chief, Andrew Delios (National University of Singapore), MikePeng (University of Texas at Dallas), and David Ahlstrom (The Chinese Universityof Hong Kong), maintained the course set by Kulwant. The recent performance of thejournal along with global trends in the academic world suggests that there is littleneed for change in APJM’s mission and overall direction. Consequently, there will besubstantial continuity in editorial policy of the journal during my term as Editor-in-Chief. This continuity is best reflected in the ongoing composition of the editorialteam. Mike Peng will continue as Consulting Editor to be joined in the same capacityby Dave Ahlstrom. I would like to acknowledge the guidance and assistance of bothin frequent conversations over the past year. I am most gratified by the decision of