Putting Rumors to Rest: The Impact, Quality, and Speed of Journal Special Issues

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Over the past 15 years many questions have been raised about the role and value of special issue papers in our major double-blind reviewed management journals. This may partially be because the publication rate of special issues has been growing. As Olk and Griffith report in the following paper, between 1956 and 1987 one special issue was published every 4.15 publication years, or 6% of the 326 total issues published by the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Academy of Management Review (AMR), Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), and the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ). In contrast, between 1988 and 1999 a special issue was published every publication year for the journals studied, or 19% of 328 issues. Even when Organization Science (OS) is excluded because it was a new journal in 1990, the publication rate of special issues is still 17% of all issues published in the latter period. Given the increased rate of special issue publication, many questions have been raised about this practice. Those asking the questions include authors, those who evaluate authors' contributions to knowledge, and even editors themselves. One concern is whether a paper submitted for a special issue will take longer to be published than a “normal” submission. If so, then younger colleagues in particular may think twice, reflect on their tenure clocks, and perhaps be less likely to submit their work. A second question concerns whether the odds are higher that a manuscript will be accepted for a special issue rather than for a normal submission. Underlying the second question is the suspicion that somehow it is “easier” to get a paper accepted for a special issue than it is for a regular submission. Among the speculations are that special issue editors are required to fill a whole issue and thus may accept lower-quality papers than normal to “fill” the special issue. Following this logic, should evaluators somehow “discount” papers published in special issues because they may be of lower quality than regularly submitted papers? We now have data with which to address these questions. In the article that follows, Paul Olk and Terri Griffith report on data collected on the five mainstream management journals noted above for the years 1956–1999, and they compare special issue articles to regularly published articles, assessing speed to publication, impact, and paper quality measured by article citation counts. The authors find that for ASQ, OS, and SMJ, special issue articles are cited at a significantly higher rate than are regular issue articles. However there is no significant difference in citation rates for AMJ and AMR. Thus, for three of the five journals studied, special issue articles have a significantly higher impact. With respect to paper quality as measured by variance in citation rates, they find that there is no significant difference in citation rate variance for four of the five journals. With the exception of ASQ, there is no significant difference in quality when the two publication venues are compared. This study should put to rest rumors and generalized rumblings regarding the quality, impact, and publication speed of special issues in mainstream management journals in the United States. I highly recommend this interesting article to the readers of Organizational Science.