Abstract
Several authors of articles in the Management Teaching Review (MTR) have asked for information to support upcoming promotion and tenure decisions. Some were developing proposals advocating the inclusion of MTR in their institution’s list of acceptable journals; others were developing requests for exceptions to their institutions’ policies. In both cases, the authors recognized that because MTR is still so new, they needed to make a case for it for their articles to count in their promotion and tenure dossiers. This editorial explains some of the background behind their requests and provides information for other authors in similar situations.
Traditionally, an academic publication counts when the article appears in a journal that meets the institution’s criteria for quality and impact. In the past 50 years, citation counts, including impact factors, have become the dominant means of measuring journal quality and impact. When a journal’s citations meet a designated threshold, calculated as an impact factor, then the journal is considered to have quality and impact. When a journal satisfies the institution’s criteria, then the articles in that journal also usually count.
The journals that satisfy an academic institution’s criteria for quality and impact often appear on lists compiled by the institution. Institutions may also rely on lists published by outside parties, such as Cabell’s Directory, the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List, or the ABS Academic Journal Guide. Other lists of journals can be found in academic publications, such as that compiled by Currie and Pandher (2013).
The problem that our pioneering MTR authors identified was that MTR was not included on their schools’ lists. Is the journal too new? Or does the situation stem from other factors, such as the fact that citation counts tend to be lower for pedagogical scholarship than for other types of scholarship (Braxton & Del Favero, 2002)? That seems reasonable, given that pedagogical contributions aim to have their greatest impact on instructors and their students, not on creating citation trails. Whatever the reason, the lack of inclusion was requiring our MTR authors to make the case for having their articles count.
I think there are three different ways to make the case for MTR. The best approach will depend on the nature of the author’s institution and the standards it uses.
The first approach revolves around identifying criteria for journal quality that do not rely on citation counts. For example,
MTR is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal committed to serving the management education community, including both academic and corporate instructors, by publishing short, topically targeted, and immediately useful resources for teaching and learning. These contributions take the form of experiential exercises, resource reviews, research-to-practice insights, practice-to-research connections, and format translations.
MTR is published by a long-standing professional association, the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, and a reputable publishing company, Sage. 1
In the last quarter of 2017, which was MTR’s second year of publication, MTR’s acceptance rate hovered between 37% and 38%.
In the current marketplace, with thousands of journals competing for quality articles, a new journal is considered fortunate to receive 50 submissions in its first year. MTR received almost twice that number in 2016, its first year of publication, and more than twice that number in 2017.
MTR is currently indexed in Cabell’s Directory, ERIC, EBSCO, and Proquest.
MTR has an experienced journal editor at the helm and an international team of management faculty as associate editors.
MTR’s Editorial Board consists of respected management scholars. Most have served on the Editorial Board of MTR’s sister journal, the Journal of Management Education, which is also hosted by MOBTS and published by Sage.
A second approach to making the case for MTR revolves around identifying an emerging set of criteria for assessing the impact of specific journal articles: Internet-based measures of usage. For example, MTR authors may cite their article’s usage statistics, including downloads and Altmetrics (online mentions), which are available on each article’s homepage.
A third approach to making the case for MTR involves a combination of the first two. Authors may show how the usage information yielded by digital tools complements the more traditional criteria of quality.
Building a quality journal takes time. The response to MTR in its first two years indicates a need for an outlet for quality teaching resources in the management education community. MTR appears to be well positioned and well on its way to becoming that quality home for immediately useful resources for management education. With our collective attention on making the case for MTR, it will only be a matter of time before MTR, too, is on the lists.