The Long and Winding Road: Publishing in Top
International (American!) Journals
Professor John Mingers
KBS Director of Research
Editor of MIS Quarterly
October 2012
The MISQ Refereeing Process
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Paper submitted and assigned to an SE. 60% are desk rejected then. It is accepted if it is
thought that, after development, the paper will be publishable.
Paper assigned to an AE who looks after the review process.
The paper is sent out to 2 or 3 referees. Generally top experts in the area(s)
Referees reports received (supposedly within 4 weeks but often 8 weeks). They are
generally long and pretty detailed (2 or 3 sides). They may be contradictory, and may be
very one-sided.
The AE decides whether to recommend accept or conditional accept (extremely unusual);
reject; major revision (most common). The AE writes a report and points out important
aspects of the referees reports.
The SE then gets is and agrees or disagrees with the decision and writes own report. The
whole package is sent back to the author(s).
The authors then have to do, usually substantial, revisions. They also have to complete a
table which mentions every point made by the reviewers, the AE and the SE and what
they have done about it. This in itself is a significant piece of work.
Steps 3 to 7 are repeated until the paper is accepted or rejected.
Do you really want to publish in top journals?
 It takes a long time, requires a lot of effort, and is risky. You may prefer
to just send it to an “easy” journal.
 You may have to adapt what you say and do to what they want more
than you would like. If so, publish in a “niche” journal
•There are definite returns:
 You may have a better paper at the end of the process – it will certainly
be different.
 Your work (and your name) will be widely seen.
 You will probably get more citations (note the REF)
 It is a mark of quality.
 It opens other doors – e.g. refereeing, invites to conferences etc.
 It is very helpful on your CV and for promotion – recruiters are much
more impressed by a top-rated publication than by several minor ones.
The main lessons
 You need to target the journal before you even do the
research let alone write the paper
 Don’t expect it to be easy or quick.
 Expect to have to do quite a lot of extra work – but
persevere.
 Don’t take rejection too hard – it happens to everyone.
 Don’t give up – send it somewhere else!
Selecting the journal
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Status vs. Risk
 Be confident that you do have a good piece of work - innovative, rigorous, and
significant or interesting
 Be able to afford rejection, so not a good idea for those needing publications
quickly
 Subject area/methodology of the journal
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Espoused theory/ theory in use
Look at articles, reviews, editors – you can often choose an AE/reviewers
Orientation does change
Send a synopsis to the chief editor to see if they would be interested
 Special issues/conferences
 Should be easier, but didn’t work for me!
Tailoring the paper
Content
 A strong grounding in the literature.
 A clear statement of the methodology for empirical work, or justification for
theoretical work.
 A clear statement of the original contribution of your work and why it is
significant “Blue Ocean papers”
 A strong concluding section summarising the paper and discussing limitations
and further research.
 If you can, link you paper into an on-going debate. Make sure you reference
papers from the journal
 Audience: knowledgeable but not expert
 Style
 Its important to put your paper in the house style. Use bibliographic software (eg
Endnote).
 Check if there are general structures the journal expects
 Clear and direct English. US journals especially like short punchy sentences, and active
tenses. Use US spellings.
 Make sure the paper looks properly finished off. Get it read by others.
Do not agonise over particular sections/wording
The submission is not the end point of some long search for perfection,
but the start of moulding your material to make it publishable
Getting highly cited
• High quality journal
• Institution of first author
• Type of paper
– Review of subject area
– Methodological overview – “How to do ….”
• Blue ocean paper – opening up a whole new area
“The Long and Winding Road”
1994-1997 Developing ideas on multimethodology in information systems.
June 1997 Paper presented at ECIS conference. Requested to submit the paper to a special issue of ISJ by
editor.
Oct. 1997 Receive two referees reports diametrically opposed to each other. One wants the philosophy
section removed (first 22 pages!) and recommends rejection, the other wants it strengthened.
Nov. 1997 Resubmit with comments about the problems of responding to the two referees.
May 1998 Receive next referees comments plus AE recommendation. One referee still suggests rejection,
the other wants further revisions. The AE, and editor, decide to reject anyway despite the
editor saying “he quite liked” the paper. Bastard!
June 1998 What the hell – revise and submit to MISQ!
Oct 1998 Receive preliminary reports from referee and AE. They feel that there is some merit in the
paper but want to split it in two and change the orientation of it. I feel that I don’t want to go
down that route.
Nov. 1998 What the hell - first submission to ISR. Allowed to nominate reviewers.
May 1999 Received first reviews, generally positive. Three reviewers, AE comments, and Senior Editors
overview.
Aug 1999 Returned paper with quite major revisions. Gave separate detailed comments to all five
reviewers.
Mar 2000 Receive second reviews from AE and three reviewers. Asked to revise and resubmit again.
May 2000 Returned paper with several more changes. Again sent comments to reviewers.
June 2000 Received further comments from AE only. Paper is accepted subject to minor changes.
June 2000 Sent revised version
July 2000 Final acceptance.
Sept 2001 Publication!!
“Redemption Song”
2004-2005 Develop a journal ranking based on a statistical analysis the Harzing data set of rankings. This has
not been done before and should be of interest because of the RAE
May 2005 Submit to British J. Management, 3*/4* journal that has covered research issues.
Nov 2005 Receive two reviews. Both quite detailed raising lots of points about the data and the analysis. One
concludes with suggestions for revisions. The other objects to the idea of clustering journals into four
groups, and the idea of journal rankings being used in the RAE. The editor decides to reject without
revisions.
Dec 2005 Submit to J. Operational Research Society, my staple journal where I have never had a rejection..
Feb 2006 Receive two reviews. One said the analysis was “broadly sensible” but did not want to garde the
journals 1 – 4. The second did not like the whole idea of ranking journals on a single scale. Also said it
was not OR but should be sent to an applied stats journal. Paper rejected.
Mar 2006 Send it to Applied Statistics. Get an immediate rejection saying there was insufficient statistical
novelty.
Mar 2006 In desperation send it to Omega, a lowish 2* journal which has already published papers on research
quality.
Mar 2006 Editor says that even though they have published papers on this in the past he considers it more
suitable for a “business library” type journal. I reply and convince him to accept it for review (but he is
obviously not very keen)
Jul 2006 Receive one review (ed. has not been able to get any others) which the reviewer themselves describe
as a diatribe “Two points to emerge from the preceding diatribe are: a) it’s a waste of time evaluating
more than the top 20 journals and b) just because its done for the RAE why should the rest of us have
to suffer?” He did make a set of review suggestions.
Aug 2006 Resubmit revised version.
Jan 2007 Receive second review plus another new one. One says, its not much better. The new one says “I
found the results much as expected but my review really asks the authors to write a different paper” a critique of journal rankings. Given one last chance but I decide that it is not worth it.
April 2007 Redemption. Give a talk and meet editor of EJIS (3*) who was very critical of journal rankings. I told
him of my paper and he said he would publish it!.
July 2007 Submit paper
Oct 2007 Published with no reviews or revisions