International Journal of Project Management: A review of the first ten years

The management of projects within various industrial sectors is an internationally recognised professional discipline which enjoys support from a small but growing community of researchers, scholars and enquiring practitioners. Specialist academic and professional journals which serve the field are relatively new. One of the prime journals, the International Journal of Project Management, celebrated ten years of continuous publication in 1992. In the ten years since its inception, the International Journal of Project Management has reached a level of stability in terms of the numbers of papers it publishes. Its papers predominantly review practical experience and literature. Some case studies have been published, but relatively few published papers have been based on empirical data. Most of the papers contribute interesting insights and describe new techniques, but few have contributed to the more formal aspects of the development of the discipline of project management by building and testing models and theories. The papers address a broad range of aspects of project management in an increasingly wide variety of industrial sectors, although the construction industry remains predominant. The journal attracts papers from practitioners and academics from various types of department, in both cases from many parts of the world. The journal has achieved a great deal in providing a forum for scholarly insights and debate about project management. However, progress has been less dramatic in terms of the development of the underlying theoretical basis of project management. Given that no other journals appear to fulfil this role, the paper concludes by speculating on the future development of project management as a discipline.