Editorial: Why are you submitting to the ISJ?

As the Editor-in-Chief, I find that I spend a fair amount of time engaged in one specific action that I don’t much enjoy: desk rejecting submissions. In this editorial, I will pursue this problem in some detail and hope to encourage authors to be a little more careful with their submissions so as to avoid the ignominious fate of having their papers desk rejected. The most common explanation for a desk reject is poor fit with the ISJ’s stated purpose: The full text is available here (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1365-2575/ homepage/ProductInformation.html). In particular, it reads, “The ISJ has particularly built its reputation by publishing qualitative research and it continues to welcome such papers. Quantitative research papers are also welcome but they need to emphasise the context of the research and the theoretical and practical implications of their findings. The ISJ does not publish purely technical papers.” Notwithstanding these remarks, the ISJ regularly receives submissions that are acontextual, lack theoretical or practical contributions, or that are purely technical. We also receive submissions that have very little, if anything, to do with information systems. I have written about the importance of context in an earlier editorial (Davison 2014). Acontextual papers often involve laboratory experiments where students are used as a population of convenience rather than design, with no justification provided other than the ubiquitous, “we were unable to gain access to managers so we asked our students to tackle managerial tasks.” Not only are students typically much younger than managers, but also their work experience is less rich. They will inevitably approach tasks very differently than seasoned managers. Thus, to avoid a desk-reject decision, papers premised on student-centric research designs must “live in the students’ worlds” (Lee and Dennis, 2012), where students compose ... [or otherwise closely resemble] ... “the population of interest ... on theoretically relevant variables” (Gordon et al., 1987). Given the latent differences between students, especially undergraduates, and managers, the plausibility of a claim that a student guinea pig research design will lead to findings of practical use to managers, or indeed anyone other than students, is tenuous at best. The whole notion of practical or managerial contributions may seem formulaic, given that this is an expected component of every research paper, but we do expect these practical contributions to be both genuine and carefully conceived. The issue of what a “technical paper” might look like is a thorny one. Does it refer to a paper that consists of page after page of mathematical equations? Alternatively, a paper that relies heavily on equations for econometric analysis? Does it also refer to papers that have large doi: 10.1111/isj.12157