Publication in High Impact Factor Journals: When Does It Expire?
Knowledge is dynamic and evolves over the time, but can we establish a previous time span for its relevance? Let's say four years? If one publishes an article in a journal in the year of 2017, will it lose its academic relevance by the end of 2020? Well, of course things do not happen this way in the academic production. It is possible to still find articles that were published about 20 years ago, and its content can be still relevant. It is common to find in different researchers in the area of management, articles that are known as a landmark in their areas of study. Because of that one article, a researcher will be recognized by peers in a specific field of the administration theory over the years, due to the contribution for the development knowledge in that area. If this is true, the logic would be to center efforts in research and publication with high potential for creating a buzz in the academia. Not everything is logic, even though in the applied Social Sciences. In Brazil, we are facing what some calls, academic productivism: the more articles one publishes, the best. Instead of concentrating on publishing one sound article, let's say once a year, some researchers are just publishing more and more, missing articles' quality. I will not go in that arena in this editorial, instead, I am going to focus on the topic of articles expiration date and the evaluation of our management graduate programs in Brazil, and the possible impact on Brazilian journals. For those outside Brazil, our business graduate programs and journals are accredited and evaluated by CAPES, a governmental high education agency, that every 4 years, attributes grades in different criteria of evaluation to Ph.D. and Master programs, that varies from 3 to 7 to be accredited and receive funds from the government. The best graduate programs are the ones with a grade of 7. One important part of this evaluation is related to the publication of professors that constitute the body of a specific program. For that, the same agency qualifies the journals in strata from C to A, being A2 and A1 the best journals. For instance, in our field we do not have any Brazilian management Journal evaluated as A1. Only periodicals outside Brazil with better impact factors are classified as A1. So far, it seems that none Brazilian journal in the management field is good enough to get an A1, according to the evaluation system established by CAPES. The number of articles that are published by professors in periodicals in stratum A1 is a determining factor for the accreditation of a postgraduate program as a top program (grade 7) and also for his/her continuity as a faculty member. Currently, only three Brazilian programs have maximum accreditation rating by that agency, and as I pointed it out, none Brazilian management journal is classified as A1. As editor of BAR for almost three years now, I think we deserve to be A1, and so does RAE, RAUSP, and some other few Brazilian management journals. This is my perception, and perception can be tricky. I do think we should have few A1 Journals in our field (made in Brazil), based on reputation and relevance, association with the best graduate programs, besides the cold metrics.
Having to compete globally to publish in top journals, Brazilian academics are under pressure and now they have to write in English, because the only A1 management/business/administration Journals are outside Brazil, and in the northern hemisphere, most of the times. Despite of the great effort to have a paper published in a top ranked journal, as a Brazilian academic, we have the expectation that our publication, for the purpose of evaluation of the graduate programs, that an article will expire in four years. How is this possible? Well, due to the metrics. We cannot stop publishing in top journals. This means that scholars to continue teaching in graduate program and to advise master and Ph.D. students at the best accredited programs, they must be productive, non- stop. It is like a never-ending search for tenure, since after the four-year period, everything has to start from scratch again. Our high impact publication expires. Of course, this is all metaphoric, but indeed true.
I am not defending that scholars should not publish. This is part of academic life and it keeps our role relevant in society. What I am saying is: instead of quantity, of expiration dates, we should focus in publishing articles that would frame our careers, and that this single paper that is recognized by peers as a relevant one, should not have a four-year expiration date. Let our community of professors and students be the ones to determine it. Also, I am defending that despite of the impact factor, our area must have A1 Brazilian Journals, or we are never going to attract the crème de la crème papers to our Journals. Authors will be looking to the northern hemisphere as a path for publication, and people in the northern hemisphere will not publish in our journals, since there is a tendency to not value what is done below the equator. I finish hoping that it makes sense when I ask: when does a publication expire?
In this issue we present you six articles as follow:
The first one, Identity in Family Firms: A Theoretical Analysis of Incentives and Contracts, by Marcelo Sanches Pagliarussi and Cristiano Costa, presents a principal-agent model that coherently and parsimoniously explains previous findings from research on executive compensation in family firms. Authors introduce organizational identification in the model in order to capture the effect of family firms' distinctive characteristics on the agent's behavior.
The second article Anomalies and Investor Sentiment: Empirical Evidences in the Brazilian Market, by Gustavo Correia Xavier and Marcio Andre Veras Machado has examined the relationship between investor sentiment and value anomalies in Brazil. In addition, it analyzed if pricing deviations caused by investors with optimistic views are different from those caused by pessimistic investors. The study found out that the measure of the sentiment index had a partial explanatory power for the anomalies only when included in the CAPM.
The third article Impacts of Interactive and Diagnostic Control System Use on the Innovation Process, by Fábio Frezatti, Diógenes de Souza Bido, Ana Paula Capuano da Cruz e Maria José C. Machado, explores the innovation process in organizations based on the Management Control System (MCS). They have found out that despite the controversial literature, highlighting the importance of the interactive use of the Management Control Systems process, by offering an empirical perspective on innovation control. A positive implication of the findings relates to the use of a broader and not exclusively internal model to increase its potentiality, reflecting the organizational reality by including the dynamism of external stimuli and the innovation control perspective.
The fourth article, The Influence of Organizational Reconciliation Policies and Culture on Workers Stress Perceptions, by Rosa Monteiro, Marta Pereira, Fernanda Daniel, Alexandre Gomes da Silva and Fátima Regina Ney Matos, indicates that work-family reconciliation plays a crucial role in the well-being of employees, having impacts at the individual, social and organizational level. Studies concluded that poor work-life balance as one of the ten predictors of psychosocial risks at work. Authors concluded that more important than the existence of reconciliation services, the perception of a supportive organizational culture, namely by colleagues and supervisors has great influence in reconciliation capability and by that way on work stress feelings.
The fifth article, Unknown Unknowns in Innovative Projects: Early Signs Sensemaking, by Rosaria de Fatima Segger Macri Russo, Roberto Sbragia and Abraham Sih Oih Yu, sought to understand the early signs' sensemaking relevance to identify unknown unknowns on innovative projects. Managing these projects, the early signs of changes in the environment, combined with a sensemaking process, can help identify them previously and mitigate the unwanted effects of these uncertainties. As a contribution, it was suggested the use of: learning process, which can provide sensemaking to early signs in unknown unknowns; project manager stimulates his team to be alert to environmental changes that may affect the project; and discussion about them in stakeholder management.
The sixth article, Career Profiles of Generation Y and Their Potential Influencers, by Helena Talita Dante Cordeiro and Lindolfo Galvão de Albuquerque, identifies the predominant career profiles among the Generation Y in Brazil and investigate the influence of demographic and professional characteristics in these profiles. The results show that people of Generation Y have high presence of attitudes related to the new careers and that the new careers are associated with high education and high income, mainly the Boundaryless career.
Enjoy reading the articles.
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
2017
