I recently completed the Strategy Science annual report for the INFORMS Publications Committee, and I thought you might enjoy hearing news from this report about the state of the Journal. Founding Editor-in-Chief Dan Levinthal left Strategy Science in truly wonderful shape, and my agenda has been to sustain the journal's substantial momentum. The good news is we are seeing continued progress on submissions, acceptance rate, downloads, issue backlog, and time to decision metrics. There is also very encouraging news regarding the Journal's impact.
Submission and Acceptance Summary
Strategy Science experienced a 5.6% increase in submissions this year. This is notable because most journals experienced a substantial COVID related drop, as scholars cleared out working papers in 2020 and 2021, leaving fewer submissions this year. The 2022 acceptance rate was 17.4%, which though a bit noisy across time seems trending downward, as expected.
Journal Impact and Performance
From our informal polling, Strategy Science is now considered a first tier journal by the majority of top business schools in the US, with publications in Strategy Science counting as first tier publications in tenure cases at these institutions. Our next hurdle is to make similar progress with a broader set of schools, particularly on a global level.
We will finally receive a Clarivate Impact Factor this next summer. Fortunately, there are now a number of other impact measures quite successfully competing with Clarivate's measure that have already evaluated Strategy Science, including the increasingly popular SJR score from SCImago-a metric based on the Google PageRank algorithm, which weights the prestige of the journals connected to each citation. As shown below in a list of journals in their "Strategy and Management" category, despite a comparatively lower number of citations per document, Strategy Science's SJR score is quite high (on par with Management Science)-the 10th highest journal in this category, suggesting that a very high percentage of Strategy Science citations appear in highly prestigious journals. These results echo the theme that while Strategy Science has high visibility at top schools and prestigious journals, we need to broaden the Journal's visibility and readership within the broader academy.
Category: Strategy and Management
Submission Processing Cycle Time
The mean and median number of days between original submission and the first decision and between original decision and final decision roughly stayed the same over the past two years, but the longer-term trend lines are declining. These numbers do not include the desk rejects that I make, which would substantially reduce these cycles times.
Backlog
Strategy Science now has a comfortable backlog of 10 months. This is a five month jump from where it was last year. With this backlog, I anticipate we will be able to increase a bit our number of papers in each issue.
Editorial Board Composition and Workload
We have taken several steps to recompose the senior/contributing editor team as well as the editorial board. In recomposing the board, we have pursued three objectives: first to simply expand the editorial board as a way to engage more people with the Journal, second to elevate the board's gender balance, and third to broaden the board's presence outside the US.
Social Media and Other Efforts to Elevate Visibility
To elevate our social media and general marketing outreach efforts this past year, we have launched a LinkedIn page and are more steadily using this and Twitter to advertise new acceptances and newly published issues. We are also continuing to use direct mail campaigns to our mailing list to now advertise both new acceptances and newly published issues. We enjoyed a sizable 46% increase in downloads this year.
Updates on New Initiatives, the Strategy Science Conference, and Other Developments
We launched a Best Paper Award this year, and announced our inaugural recipients. We will launch our first Virtual Special Issue in 2023, with others in the planning. We have an exciting special issue on corporate purpose that will appear in 2023. The Strategy Science Conference is quickly gaining a reputation as a premier conference in strategy with growing submissions even through COVID the past two years. We are excited that the conference will be held internationally (Munich) for the first time this year and hope you will submit your work for consideration. We continue to see the Journal and Conference as highly complementary in generating impact and prestige.
How can you help?
Submit your best work to Strategy Science which we promise to both carefully edit, and widely publicize if accepted.
Please also ensure that your university library subscribes to Strategy Science. The additional charge if they already subscribe to other INFORMS journals is not particularly large, and a simple email from an interested faculty member is often sufficient for them to add the journal to their subscription list.
Finally, we encourage you to read, share and cite work in Strategy Science. If you don't already, we encourage you to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter where we consistently share newly accepted and published work, as well as other news of the Journal and the Strategy Science community.
I hope to see you at an upcoming conference.
Sincerely,
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Todd Zenger
Editor-in-Chief, Strategy Science
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