Writing Nonempirical Articles for Journal of Management: General Thoughts and Suggestions

Abstract

Most of the articles that appear in Journal of Management (JOM) are empirical. Generally, these report original data collected from one or more samples and deployed to test a social scientific theory of work behavior. Empirical articles are crucial to JOM’s success as they are for most other scholarly journals. But JOM goes further. In addition to our many empirical articles, JOM also published a sizable number of nonempirical ones. These usually, though not necessarily, appear in the two or more special issues that are published each year. To illustrate how important review articles are to JOM, let me consider two indicators— impact and online viewings. Both these indices are available on the JOM Web site (http://jom. sagepub.com/). “Impact,” or the number of citations in scholarly articles, is the best known and more widely used measure of success. As of June 2009, the top five most cited (i.e., highest impact) articles in this history of JOM were all review articles. More recently, with the rise of the World Wide Web, we can count online viewings. Three of the top five most frequently viewed articles are from review issues. As can easily be seen from these data, nonempirical articles are important for JOM. When I was serving as editor from 2006 to 2008, our team received literally hundreds of proposals and articles that were submitted for the small number of slots in our review issues. Sifting through these articles was a massive task, but it came with recompense. I was forced to think long and hard about successful and unsuccessful articles, and I learned to do so through two criteria—which submissions survived the editorial review process and which were later cited (or viewed online) by others scholars. (Probably my most unanticipated editorial task was reading old articles to ascertain what made them interesting.) In this short article, my goal is to share what I learned and, if I am successful, to thereby save contributors a lot of their time by helping them focus their efforts. I will discuss three different types of articles that I saw a lot of and discuss problems that are commonly associated with each. I understand that such observations can seem abstract. I learned by seeing concrete examples, and I suspect the same may be true for others. Therefore, I promise to “name names,” referring directly to articles that illustrate each point.