Which journal characteristics best invite submissions?

In an earlier editorial (Davison, 2019), I asked the question "For whom do we, as authors, write?" and drew on responses from a group of 10 international scholars to examine three possible audiences: reviewers, readers, and self. In this editorial, I use a similar approach to ask a related question, but this time focusing on the characteristics of an academic journal that make it attractive to prospective authors. I identified a dozen or so potential respondents (of whom 10 replied) and asked them: "Ignoring questions of ranking and any list of preferred journals that your department may prefer you to publish in, what are the characteristics of a journal that you (as a potential author) identify as contributing to its relevance or appropriateness as an outlet for your research?" I deliberately asked my respondents not to think about journal ranking indices or departmental lists because I reasoned that these might exert a strong bias on the responses, even to the exclusion of all other issues. My reason for asking about the journal characteristics that authors find compelling is perhaps self-serving, but it is inextricably linked to the ethos of a journal and its editor(s). The argument is anthropomorphic, but I suggest that each journal exists in a self-created intellectual niche. Naturally, this niche may be narrower or broader, and in some journals, it may be so wide that almost any paper is in principle in scope. However, the advantage of a focused niche is that it encourages a focus on specific types of research topics, questions, and methods, to serve a certain community of readers, and thereby to make a certain contribution to certain discourses. Naturally, some journals are more specialised (with more restricted niches) than others. Whatever the niche, journals need to retain their relevance for their audience, lest they lose their raison d'être. There could be many indicators of a journal facing relevance challenges: falling submission numbers, falling acceptance rates, falling impact factor, people's reluctance to review, exclusion from indices or lists of preferred journals. This is a conundrum for editors because a journal's relevance largely depends on submissions being appropriate for the niche, as identified by the editors and confirmed by the reviewers and audience. Special issues may provide focused means of attracting submissions, but apart from this, authors vote with their fingers: If they choose to shun a journal for whatever reason, that journal's relevance can be seriously challenged. If this happens, some deep soul searching may be called for, and perhaps a change of editorial direction, ie, a refocus as to the types of articles that the journal publicly states it wants to publish. I can anticipate situations, however, where a journal is hi-jacked by a particular interest group which tries to orient it towards their own needs, by flooding it with submissions that conform to a certain type, genre, method, philosophy, or epistemology. If the journal is happy to play along, then the result may be positive for both the Machiavellian interlopers and the journal itself, though other potential authors may be disappointed and dissuaded from submitting. The situation is particularly problematic if the journal is highly ranked as potential contributing authors may then feel that the number of top journals that they can submit to has dwindled further. Existing members of the editorial board will also need to decide whether to stay with the new ethos or to seek greener pastures elsewhere, assuming that they are not shuffled aside altogether. Nevertheless, so long as a critical mass of submitting authors, editors, reviewers, subscribers, readers, and citers exists, the journal's intellectual health may be retained with the new focus: no journal can survive long without an appreciative audience, an army of loyal soldiers who will robustly flock to its defence in times of difficulty. Many characteristics are likely to reflect the values of the journal and its editorial team. These include the following: the types of papers published; the nature of the review process, including whether reviews are perceived to be constructive and developmental, timely, actionable, polite, and sophisticated 1; the nature of the journal's audience and the way the journal interacts with its audience; and the flexibility of the journal in handling non-standard articles. I now turn to the views of my esteemed colleagues with respect to what characteristics make a journal attractive for their research. I organize these characteristics into four categories: reputation, audience, topic relevance, and fit. Authors pay careful attention to the reputation of journals. This includes the reputation of the editors, that of the authors who have successfully published there, and even the reputation of the publisher itself. RM 2 notes that he checks to see if "reputable scholars are on the editorial board as SEs and AEs, and whether the board is diverse in terms of research expertise." Reputation is also informed by the attitude of journal editors towards time management. Authors appreciate a journal that delivers reviews, or publishes accepted papers, within a reasonable timeframe. TM remarks that he selects journals that are well recognized for having fast review and publication cycle times. Journal reputation also hinges on the quality of the reviews. Like many authors, PN and JB seek journals that provide high-quality, constructive, and timely reviewer comments. In this light, NP notes that a journal that has a reputation for acquiring the services of constructive reviewers will be much appreciated! The issue of the audience follows on from my earlier editorial, since readers are clearly one of the targets of our writing. PN notes that he would like to find an audience that will find the contribution of the paper relevant and helpful. RM hopes to find readers who are serious scholars to CB selects journals on the basis that the journal's readers are the people she is trying to influence. She wants those people to read her work and change what they do because of what she says. As a result, she only publishes in venues where she thinks those people will read her papers. On an ideological level, JB notes that for him, what is very important is "whether a journal has an open access policy," since "researchers in developing countries and non-academics often find it hard to access research behind a paywall." Clearly, if one is writing for an audience that needs open access, then the extent to which one's published research is freely accessible by the audience is critical. A key consideration for authors is the extent to which the subject of their research has previously been published in the journal and thus whether it is suitable for the journal in terms of theme, method, and contribution. Allied to this is the idea that the journal is sufficiently broad-minded to accept submissions on a wide range of topics. Thus, YT asks whether the journal has previously published papers relevant to her research topics and methodology. Moreover, RM hopes that the journal's editors are ideologically open-minded but is concerned about "activist" editors who want all papers to fall in line with their preferred ism. Meanwhile, JT asserts "in my mind, the ideal IS journal does not get overly hung up on whether there is a strong IT artifact, whether the theory is sufficiently contextualized, or even if the paper is 'IS enough'; the ideal journal would be one that simply asks 'do the findings hold potential to shed light on how new information technologies are changing how we interact, forcing an evolution in basic firm processes, and afford opportunities to make the world a better place." JT also suggests that "if a journal becomes too restrictive about 'what is IS research', it loses an opportunity to be a home to the breadth of the field." The perspectives here are all inclined to the view that a journal is more attractive when it adopts an inclusive position with regard to the topics that are seen as being in scope, and thus that its chosen niche is wider rather than narrower, even to the extent of not being a niche at all. Allied to the relevance of the topic is the issue of fit, which may be either intellectual or ideological. RM suggests that when there is a good "perceived fit" between the research article and the journal, then it is more likely that a review team will be favourably disposed towards the research. This fit may also be seen in the ongoing intellectual conversation that takes place in the journal. NP opines that she submits to journals where she would expect her study to make a contribution to an existing debate. RM looks for opportunities to "join and contribute to an ongoing conversation in the journal." TM takes these ideas further, stating that he appreciates journals that stimulate his thinking, a theme also taken up by CU who looks out for intellectual depth. PN notes that there is a strong pressure in Norway and the EU towards publishing only in open access journals: This is fit at the institutional level, since the requirement to publish in these venues emanates from institutions more than individuals. On a rather different note, JB suggests a preference for journals where there is representation from both authors and editors/reviewers who are located in the global south and thus who are familiar with the constraints that apply in less developed contexts. JT provides a useful overview of the nature of what it is that makes a journal attractive. He writes: No paper is perfect. My ideal journal would not conform to a strict orthodoxy for what is the perfect topic, perfect method, or perfect writing style. Rather it would focus on the ideas, how they add nuanced insight, and whether upon reaching the paper's conclusions, the reader can answer the question "Did I learn something new?" with a "yes." As Editor of the ISJ, I find no cause for disagreement with any of the opinions expressed here. However, I will highlight a few more that I think worthy of attention. First, I feel that power brokers, including journal editors and reviewers, have a solemn responsibility to bridge the sometimes-yawning divide between themselves and authors. We do this primarily through the review process, but this process needs to be constructive, polite, respectful, friendly, rigorous, and timely. These are the standards that we aspire to uphold, whether we are asking authors for revisions, gently declining their work or congratulating them for their fine contributions. Second, as a premier and mainstream journal, I hope that we publish articles that are accessible to and consumable by a broad audience. Nevertheless, those same articles should be methodologically sound, intellectually challenging, and ground-breaking: We seek to advance knowledge about Information Systems in terms of both practical and scholarly aspects. Finally, transparency. This is something that we are not always very good at. It is something that authors sometimes have cause to complain about. We need to do a better job of opening up the black box of the publishing process so that authors know what happens, when it happens, how it happens. Some authors send me an email a week after submitting their articles demanding to know why the same articles are not yet accepted! Well, you may laugh, but it's true. At the other extreme, other authors ask why, 6 months after submission, we still did not get back to them with a decision informed by reviews. That is not something we are proud of and certainly do our very best to avoid, yet unforeseeable circumstances arise occasionally. Either way, we need to do a better job of communicating with our authors. I am indebted to the 10 scholars who took the trouble to offer their insights into the nature of what makes a journal worth submitting to: Cathy Urquhart (CU), Cynthia Beath (CB), Han-fen Hu (HH), Jason Thatcher (JT), Jean-Paul van Belle (JB), Niki Panteli (NP), Petter Nielsen (PN), MN Ravishankar (RM), Tobias Mettler (TM), and Yu Tong (YT). I also thank my colleagues who gave feedback on this editorial: Monideepa Tarafdar, Andrew Hardin, and Angsana Techatassanasoontorn. In this issue of the ISJ, we publish seven papers to celebrate the start of the end of our third decade: volume 30. In the first paper, Raman and Grover (2020) conduct a multi-method study to investigate social interactions regarding IT-enabled work in a large hospital setting. Utilizing both qualitative and multilevel quantitative data, they study two types of knowledge networks that represent these interactions: help seeking and voluntary contribution. Their results indicate how overall network cohesiveness versus people's location in structural hole positions relate to employees' adaptation to IT-enabled work differently, depending on the type of the network. This provides implications for how organizations should distinctively manage different sets of informal social interactions among the same set of employees at work to help optimize employees' adaptation to IT-enabled work. In the second paper, Guo and Yu (2020) investigate online anonymity, which is often seen as antithetic to discipline because individuals can hide their identities and therefore escape discipline for their bad behaviours. However, the authors argue that this antithetic relationship between anonymity and discipline is more complex than it seems. Based on the postings on a real-life online forum, they find that individuals were subjected to various forms of discipline even though they were anonymous. Why is discipline possible when people are anonymous? A likely reason, the authors argue, is that individuals have their online "anonymous selves" to maintain. The self is paradoxically both anonymous, to the extent that the real individual is unknown, and identifiable, to the extent that the individual is known for his or her social identity. Information technology, therefore, helps build an "omniopticon" society, where everyone can watch and discipline everyone (including themselves). In the third paper, Avgerou and Bonina (2020) make the assumption that IT innovation is an intrinsically political process and then aim to enhance existing sociotechnical views of IT and public sector reform by introducing the influence of ideology on IT innovation in governments. Using critical discourse analysis to develop their contribution, the paper argues that the objectives and outcomes of IT innovation in the public sector involve three complementary domains of ideological contestation: the ideology of e-government as a major transformative force, the ideology underpinning substantive public policy areas, and the ideology about how the public sector should be reformed. The research develops its arguments using an extensive empirical case of two consecutive IT projects for the administration of international trade in Mexico that traces changes on efficiency and legality as indicators of the transformational effects of IT. The perspective developed in the paper challenges the rationality of generally beneficial public sector transformation associated with IT innovation; instead, it uncovers the ideological effects that are important to explain observed outcomes and for predicting IT-enabled organizational change. In the fourth paper, Tarafdar, Maier, Laumer, and Weitzel (2020) engage in a detailed investigation of the technostress associated with social networking sites (SNS). They find that when faced with such stress, SNS users adopt two coping strategies. In the first strategy, they divert or distract themselves by engaging in activities that lie beyond the stress creating SNS, such as hobbies. Alternatively, and counterintuitively, in the second strategy, they distract themselves by using the same SNS all the more. This is associated with an increased likelihood of technology addiction. The two coping strategies are not mutually exclusive in that individuals can adopt either. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of feature-rich IT, coping through distraction and technology frames, their three-wave study of 444 Facebook users establishes a theoretical and empirical link between two concepts of the dark side of IT use: technostress from and the addiction to using SNS. In the fifth paper, Malik and Nicholson (2020) report on case study research into impact sourcing involving a USA vendor with a subsidiary in rural Pakistan. The authors draw on institutional theory to examine how practices in a market-driven IT outsourcing vendor respond to the logics in the subsidiary location. The results reveal family, community, and profession logics and management practices of the vendor responding to these logics. Malik and Nicholson proceed to abstract a process model that explains the dynamics of institutional logics and institutionally aligned management practices. By highlighting the significance of market-driven IT outsourcing, their findings are important for impact sourcing research 3 and are immediately useful for managers. In the sixth paper, Dale and Scheepers (2020) address an ongoing problem that organizations have in implementing their enterprise architecture (EA) plans. Despite more than three decades of EA research, organizations continue to have difficulty implementing their EA plans and architects continue to have difficulty building shared understandings and objectives with their stakeholders. This paper examines the challenges of enterprise architecture implementation (EAI) from the perspective of the inter-personal connections between architects and their business and technology stakeholders. Though architects "own" the EAI, they are dependent on business executives to fund the technology products and programs and technology executives to provide staff and resources to implement those products. Wenger's (1998) communities of practice theory is used to investigate two cases of EAI with a focus on practices that enable or prevent architects from establishing shared understandings and objectives with their stakeholders. In the seventh paper, McKenna (2020) explores how social movements can use virtual worlds to raise awareness or create safe spaces for their members. This paper presents an interpretive field study using netnographic research and empirical data from a study of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movement in World of Warcraft. Noting that social-technical theories are required to further understand the relationship between collective action and technology use, the author takes the position that an understanding of affordances is required for social movements to be able to shape the use of virtual worlds for their own goals and intentions. The author creates the concept of convivial affordances, which brings together the theories of affordances and conviviality, and suggests that social users can shape IT artefacts through a creative combination of affordances for their specific goals, and with community involvement.