Evidence-based understanding of introductions of research articles

Achieving publications in high-impact journals is a major cornerstone for academic careers in the US and elsewhere in the world. However, apart from novel insights and relevant contributions to the field, there are expectations of editors and reviewers regarding the structure and language of manuscripts that prospective contributors have to adhere to. As these expectations are mostly communicated using best-practice examples, especially international researchers might often wonder how to implement them in their manuscripts. Applying an applied linguistics model to 60 papers that were published in US-based and Indian management journals we derive evidence-based advice for the writing of introductions.

[1]  Klaus Krippendorff,et al.  Answering the Call for a Standard Reliability Measure for Coding Data , 2007 .

[2]  John M. Swales,et al.  Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings , 1993 .

[3]  Klaus Krippendorff,et al.  Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology , 1980 .

[4]  Kyle J. Mayer,et al.  Publishing in AMJ—Part 4: Grounding Hypotheses , 2011 .

[5]  S. Ashford.  Having Scholarly Impact: The Art of Hitting Academic Home Runs , 2013 .

[6]  J. Swales,et al.  The Writing of Research Article Introductions , 1987 .

[7]  Gerry McNamara,et al.  Publishing in AMJ—Part 2: Research Design , 2011 .

[8]  T. Fox,et al.  A Geopolitics Of Academic Writing , 2002 .

[9]  R. Choudhury,et al.  Impact of Age on Pay Satisfaction and Job Satisfaction Leading to Turnover Intention: A Study of Young Working Professionals in India , 2011 .

[10]  T. Burgess,et al.  Editorial Board Membership of Management and Business Journals: A Social Network Analysis Study of the Financial Times 40 , 2010 .

[11]  Betty Samraj,et al.  Introductions in research articles: variations across disciplines , 2002 .

[12]  Niels G. Noorderhaven,et al.  Distributive justice, procedural justice, exemplarity, and employees’ willingness to cooperate in M&A integration processes : An analysis of the Air France-KLM merger , 2011 .

[13]  Mohammad Amin Mozaheb,et al.  Um estudo comparativo de introdução de artigos de pesquisa escritos por falantes nativos e não nativos de inglês, com base em pesquisas sobre gênero textual , 2014 .

[14]  Anshuman Bhattacharya,et al.  Predictability of Job-Satisfaction: An Analysis from Age Perspective , 2011 .

[15]  David J. Ketchen,et al.  How to Get Published in the Best Management Journals , 2016 .

[16]  Dov Eden,et al.  From the Editors Publishing across Borders: Furthering the Internationalization of AMJ , 2003 .

[17]  Kumju Hwang,et al.  The Inferior Science and the Dominant Use of English in Knowledge Production , 2005 .

[18]  Gi-Zen Liu,et al.  Genre-based writing instruction blended with an online writing tutorial system for the development of academic writing , 2018, Digit. Scholarsh. Humanit..

[19]  Adam M. Grant,et al.  Publishing in AMJ—Part 3: Setting the Hook , 2011 .

[20]  D. Biber,et al.  Book Review: Discourse on the Move: Using Corpus Analysis to Describe Discourse Structure by Douglas Biber, Ulla Connor, and Thomas A. Upton , 2007, CL.

[21]  Ahmed Fakhri.  RHETORICAL PROPERTIES OF ARABIC RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS , 2004 .

[22]  D. Knippenberg,et al.  How Does Bureaucracy Impact Individual Creativity? A Cross-Level Investigation of Team Contextual Influences on Goal Orientation–Creativity Relationships , 2011 .

[23]  M. Srivastava,et al.  Anxiety, Stress and Satisfaction among Professionals in Manufacturing and Service Organizations , 2011 .

[24]  M. M. D. S. Rubio,et al.  A Pragmatic Approach to the Macro-Structure and Metadiscoursal Features of Research Article Introductions in the Field of Agricultural Sciences. , 2011 .

[25]  Danny Miller,et al.  In Search of the Best of Both Worlds , 2014 .

[26]  S. Rynes,et al.  What Makes Management Research Interesting, And Why Does It Matter? , 2006 .

[27]  Jason Miin-Hwa Lim,et al.  How do writers establish research niches? A genre-based investigation into management researchers' rhetorical steps and linguistic mechanisms , 2012 .

[28]  M. G. Shahnawaz,et al.  Effect of Psychological Contract Violation on Organizational Commitment, Trust and Turnover Intention in Private and Public Sector Indian Organizations , 2011 .

[29]  Elena Sheldon,et al.  Rhetorical differences in RA introductions written by English L1 and L2 and Castilian Spanish L1 writers , 2011 .

[30]  Donald D. Bergh,et al.  From the Editors Deriving Greater Benefit from the Reviewing Process , 2002 .

[31]  Shailendra Singh,et al.  Leader-Member Exchange & Perceived Organizational Justice-An Empirical Investigation , 2011 .

[32]  M. Alvesson,et al.  Ways of constructing research questions: gap-spotting or problematization? , 2011 .

[33]  Malay Biswas.  Moral Competency , 2011 .

[34]  Pratima Bansal,et al.  The Conventions of Management Research and their Relevance to Management Practice , 2002 .

[35]  Becky Kwan,et al.  Facilitating novice researchers in project publishing during the doctoral years and beyond: a Hong Kong-based study , 2013 .

[36]  J. Swales.  Aspects of article introductions , 2011 .

[37]  T. Judge,et al.  What Causes a Management Article to be Cited—Article, Author, or Journal? , 2007 .

[38]  Promila Agarwal,et al.  Relationship between Psychological Contract & Organizational Commitment in Indian IT Industry , 2011 .

[39]  J. Hollenbeck.  The Role of Editing in Knowledge Development: Consensus Shifting and Consensus Creation , 2008 .

[40]  Helene Tenzer,et al.  Boundaryless Careers or Career Boundaries? The Impact of Language Barriers on Academic Careers in International Business Schools , 2019, Academy of Management Learning & Education.

[41]  Sushmita Srivastava,et al.  A Study of the Impact of Types of Job Change on Perceived Performance of Newly Rotated Managers: The Mediating Role of Job Change Dimensions , 2011 .

[42]  Elizabeth J. McClean,et al.  High‐commitment HR practices, employee effort, and firm performance: Investigating the effects of HR practices across employee groups within professional services firms , 2011 .

[43]  Mattias Jacobsson,et al.  The grabber: making a first impression the Wilsonian way , 2014 .

[44]  Helene Loe Colman,et al.  Organizational Identification and Serendipitous Value Creation in Post-Acquisition Integration , 2011 .

[45]  Deepti Pathak,et al.  Moderating Effect of Personality Variable on Stress-Effectiveness Relationship: An Empirical Study on B-School Students , 2011 .

[46]  Diane Belcher,et al.  How Research Space Is Created in a Diverse Research World. , 2009 .

[47]  G. George.  Management Research in AMJ: Celebrating Impact While Striving for More , 2016 .

[48]  Viviana Cortes.  Discourse on the Move: Using Corpus Analysis to Describe Discourse Structure. By Douglas Biber, Ulla Connor, Thomas Upton. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2007. xii + 289 pages, price US $158, ISBN: 978 90 272 2302 9. , 2010 .

[49]  David M. Kaplan,et al.  The role of calculative attachment in the relationship between diversity climate and retention , 2011 .

[50]  Congjun Mu,et al.  Understanding Chinese Multilingual Scholars' Experiences of Publishing Research in English , 2018, Journal of Scholarly Publishing.

[51]  Ken Starkey,et al.  Bridging the Relevance Gap: Aligning Stakeholders in the Future of Management Research , 2001 .

[52]  Chih-Hua Kuo,et al.  A Corpus-Based Approach to Online Materials Development for Writing Research Articles , 2011 .

[53]  Wayne F. Cascio,et al.  Research in industrial and organizational psychology from 1963 to 2007: changes, choices, and trends. , 2008, The Journal of applied psychology.

[54]  Eliana Hirano,et al.  Research article introductions in English for specific purposes: A comparison between Brazilian Portuguese and English , 2009 .

[55]  Alan L. Mackay,et al.  Publish or perish , 1974, Nature.

[56]  Gerard George,et al.  Publishing in AMJ: Part 1: Topic choice: From the Editors , 2011 .

[57]  A. Huff.  Writing for scholarly publication , 1998 .

[58]  Ji Li,et al.  Age diversity and firm performance in an emerging economy: Implications for cross-cultural human resource management , 2011 .

[59]  Gerard George.  Publishing in AMJ for Non-U.S. Authors , 2012 .

[60]  Wayne Trotman.  Research Genres: Explorations and Applications , 2005 .

[61]  Phuong Dzung Pho,et al.  Research article abstracts in applied linguistics and educational technology: a study of linguistic realizations of rhetorical structure and authorial stance , 2008 .

[62]  Y. Baruch.  Global or North American? , 2001 .

[63]  Karen Locke,et al.  Constructing Opportunities for Contribution: Structuring Intertextual Coherence and “Problematizing” in Organizational Studies , 1997 .

[64]  Herman Aguinis,et al.  Meta-Analytic Choices and Judgment Calls: Implications for Theory Building and Testing, Obtained Effect Sizes, and Scholarly Impact , 2011 .

[65]  J. Barney,et al.  Editor’s Comments: Positioning a Theory Paper for Publication , 2018, Academy of Management Review.

[66]  Ming Yan,et al.  The differential effects of job design on knowledge workers and manual workers: A quasi‐experimental field study in China , 2011 .

[67]  K. Cadman.  Thesis writing for international students: A question of identity? , 1997 .

[68]  Anton J. Villado,et al.  Getting Specific about Demographic Diversity Variable and Team Performance Relationships: A Meta-Analysis , 2011 .

[69]  Dwayne Whitten,et al.  Pay It Forward: The Positive Crossover Effects of Supervisor Work—Family Enrichment , 2011 .

[70]  Chek Kim Loi.  Research article introductions in Chinese and English: A comparative genre-based study , 2010 .

[71]  Cornelius J. König,et al.  Toward Evidence-Based Writing Advice: Using Applied Linguistics to Understand Reviewers’ Expectations , 2016 .

[72]  Ken Hyland,et al.  6. GENRE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND LITERACY , 2002, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.

[73]  A. Johns.  Coherence and Academic Writing: Some Definitions and Suggestions for Teaching , 1986 .

[74]  Pilar Mur Dueñas.  Getting research published internationally in English: An ethnographic account of a team of Finance Spanish scholars' struggles , 2012 .

[75]  Janet Holmes,et al.  Doubt and Certainty in ESL Textbooks , 1988 .

[76]  Daniel G. Bachrach,et al.  Scholarly Influence in the Field of Management: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Determinants of University and Author Impact in the Management Literature in the Past Quarter Century , 2008 .

[77]  Katherine Nicoll,et al.  Constructing the Good Teacher in Higher Education: The discursive work of standards , 2003 .

[78]  Li Zhao,et al.  Turning good research into good publications , 2013 .

[79]  Bradley L. Kirkman,et al.  Everything You've Always Wanted to Know about AMJ (But May Have Been Afraid to Ask) , 2005 .

[80]  Alan Davies,et al.  Applied Linguistics: Subject to Discipline? , 2008 .

[81]  Chris M. Golde,et al.  At Cross Purposes: What the Experiences of Today's Doctoral Students Reveal about Doctoral Education. , 2001 .

[82]  Richard T. Watson,et al.  Analyzing the Past to Prepare for the Future: Writing a Literature Review , 2002, MIS Q..

[83]  Sierk A. Horn,et al.  Non-English Nativeness As Stigma in Academic Settings , 2017 .