The virtue of brevity

Abstract

Before the rise of online-only publishing, journals, including the ISJ, operated with page budgets, which determined the annual limit of pages that could be published. A decade ago, at the ISJ, this amounted to some 576 journal pages.However, with the advent of online-only publishing, the concept of a page budget has disappeared. The total number of pages increased gradually, at first to 666, to 800 and then it jumped to over 1000. Wiley, the publisher of the ISJ, has informed us that there is no limit at all to how many pages (or articles) we can publish a year, so long as quality standards are maintained. In 2023, the ISJ published 43 research articles, 8 editorials and 3 book reviews, a total of 1458 journal pages or 253% of the pre-online-only model. We expect that in future these numbers will continue to rise.Not only has the number of accepted articles increased but also has their length. It used to be the case that we requested authors to keep within 8000 words. This was supposed to be an all-inclusive word count from title to references and appendices. With the passing of time, the restrictions of paper length have largely disappeared. Table 1 below presents the guidance given to authors for the AIS Senior Scholars' List of Premier Journals as well as several others. While there is some wiggle room, the general guidance tends to sit within the 8000-to 12 000-word range, or 38-55 pages. This is similar to adjacent fields: the Academy of Management Journal allows 40 double-spaced pages including references, tables, figures and appendices, 1 and Organisation Studies permits up to 13 000 words encompassing references, tables, figures and appendices. 2 Computer Science journals tend to publish briefer papers.For instance, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence allows 35 double spaced pages 3 and IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials charges authors $220 for per page over 30 pages (up to 8 pages). 4 Today it is not unusual for a first-round submission to be in the 12 000-word range and for a finally accepted article to be 15 000. Even 20 000-word epics are by no means unheard of. Why all this verbosity? One reason is that authors and reviewers get trapped in what we call a text-accumulation trap. Authors submit papers with as much information as possible, hoping to instil confidence in the review team as to its completeness, as well as to prepare for both expected and unexpected reviewer demands. Reviewers then read the paper, yet ask for even more detail, and authors feel obliged to respond in kind. Over multiple revision cycles, satisfying all the reviewers requires ever more words. Reviewers should be mindful of the text-accumulation trap. When requesting authors to incorporate large amounts of new material, it is necessary to weigh the value of this extra material against the risk of unnecessarily bloating the manuscript.In addition, it is easier to write more than less, easier to include more literature, more cross-references, more examples, more arguments and more details. In ...