Creating and Disseminating Knowledge Among Organizational Scholars: The Role of Special Issues

Abstract

Special issues of scholarly journals have become more common during the last decade of management research. We review this trend and assess the effectiveness of special issues for knowledge dissemination. Methods include interviews with journal editors, compiling data on time to publication and on impact and quality of special issues for five mainstream management journals, and a case study chronicling the creation of the Organization Science special issue on “Knowledge, Knowing, and Organizations.” The findings show that journal special issue articles appear to be published more quickly than regular issue articles (time to publication), and for three of the five journals there is a significant difference in impact (measured as citation counts per article) when special and regular issue articles are compared. Further, we find evidence of greater variation in the quality of special issue articles compared to regular issue articles, although this reflects special issues publishing exceptional articles rather than the inclusion of substandard ones. The case analysis suggests that a series of preconferences on a common topic prior to a special issue did not appear to impact the type of papers submitted to or published in the special issue. We discuss the role of special issues and preconferences in knowledge development in organization science.

Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Editor Behavior through Potentially Coercive Citations

“…The maximum significance level was set to be equal to 0.05. In line with other research [35], we distinguish the impact of editing of special issues versus a regular issue through a chi square test.…”

Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Editor Behavior through maybe Coercive Citations

“…The maximum significance level was set to be equal to 0.05. In line with other research [45], we distinguish the impact of editing of special issue versus a regular issue through a Chi Square test.…”

The early adulthood of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management: A literature review 2005–2014

“…Usually these Special Issues provide opportunities for analyzing state of the art research on a specific theme, improving our understanding about it, bringing together scholars from diverse areas, and explaining theoretical advances and empirical tests. Furthermore, each article in a Special Issue increases its exposure to the research community and its impact on it due to the high synergy within the issue (Olk & Griffith 2004). Up to 36% of the articles included in the journal's h-cores were published in Special Issues (it rises to 40% for the 2005-2009 period).…”

“…Among the most recent Special Issues, the most influential volumes are the one focused on management issues in ethnic Chinese communities (Ahlstrom, Chen, & Yeh, 2010) and the one dealing with managing corporate governance in Asia (Globerman, Peng, & Shapiro, 2011). In short, these Special Issues positively impacted knowledge development (Olk and Griffith, 2004), as well as the journal's performance and metrics.…”