Top 10 tips for publishing CSR research in top journals

Contrary to popular belief, most university faculty don't spend the whole summer lounging on the beach or sitting in the garden. For most of us, summer is the time when we can really focus on our research without the usual distractions of teaching and university administration.

Although many academics do this research because they enjoy it, it is also a critical part of our role. Success in publishing our research is often the number one reason why we get hired or not, or whether we get that promotion or pay rise that we're after. Publish or perish is a mantra that is very real for many of us.

Publication, however, is no easy matter. There is great competition for space in the best scholarly outlets, like high ranked journals and prestigious book publishers. Those of us doing research on corporate responsibility issues, whether CSR, business ethics, business and sustainability, or whatever else sometimes struggle to meet the kinds of standards expected by these outlets. This is not because we're any less smart than other researchers, but we do have a complicated subject that doesn't always lend itself very well to the demands of the top tier journals. There is also just simply lot to learn about the publishing process, especially for PhD students, junior researchers or those relatively new to the demands of publishing their work in premier English-language journals.

As a result of this, we often find ourselves giving advice to other CSR researchers, especially at the many workshops and conferences that crop up over the summer. We tend to tailor this advice to the different audiences we speak to, but we also thought that it might be helpful to give a more general list of top tips that anyone doing work in the area could hopefully learn something from. Our thoughts are particularly relevant to publishing in high ranked management journals, but most of the lessons translate beyond this. Let us know if you find them helpful or if you have your own suggestions, just add them in the comment section below.

1. Make time for research. This is the critical starting place. Good work requires a substantial investment of time and energy and lots of researchers spend a lot of their time on teaching and service. In the CSR space, in particular, many of us are so passionate about our subject that our available research time is easily eaten up by working with our students or lobbying our colleagues to include more CSR content in their courses. Carving out the necessary space and time for research is critical. There are no shortcuts.

2. Find great co-authors … but select them carefully. OK, so maybe there is one shortcut: finding other people to do some of the research with you. But co-authorships go wrong as often as they go well. So choosing carefully is critical. Find people with complementary skills, who understand the subject in different but related ways to you. Remember, CSR issues are complicated, so just as we always advocate partnership by organizations, so too do we need to partner to understand a phenomenon. But if we go too broad, we risk losing the all-essential focus that the top journals aim for. Our no.1 piece of advice for selecting co-authors - find someone you can go for a drink or a coffee with and feel energized afterwards.
 
3. Write for a clearly defined audience, with a carefully targeted paper, that joins a specific conversation. Research doesn't happen in a vacuum. Who do you want to read your work? No, really, who exactly do you have in mind? What have they written about your subject? Answer these questions and join an ongoing conversation rather than trying to start a whole new one. It may seem like CSR issues are new and exciting, but many of the issues, problems or concepts that we find interesting have been addressed by others in other ways. Some scholars live by the maxim that if you think an idea is really new then you probably just haven't read enough. So make sure you do read enough and make sure that your work is crafted for a particular audience. If it helps, think of it like a product that has to fill a clearly defined need.

4. Be clear what the research gap is that you are aiming to fill, and what your contribution is. Probably the number one reason that editors reject corporate responsibility papers is that they don't make a clear enough contribution. Typically, this means, a contribution to academic theory. So nailing down the research gap and deciding for yourself what your unique contribution is will reap rewards. Especially if the contribution is one valued by those other researchers that you're aiming to write for.

5. Try as far as possible to be theory rather than phenomenon driven. This is one that many CSR researchers struggle with. We're doing research in this area because we find the issues themselves fascinating. This means we tend to phenomenon-driven. But the higher ranked journals all typically look for a theoretical contribution and so they expect the research they publish to be theoretically-driven. So if you don't want to take too many risks with that limited amount of research time you have, work out how to make the translation from phenomenon to theory and start as you mean to go on.

6. Different contexts have to be theoretically distinctive (revising/extending theory) not just new applications of existing theory. This is particularly relevant for those doing research on or in particular countries or industries, which is so common in the CSR field just because it has become so ubiquitous. The key thing to remember here is that just because no one has done research on your country or industry before, that doesn't mean it needs to be done now. If you're following the advice we've already laid out, you'll be thinking - what is it about this country or industry that is sufficiently different that it renders existing theories inadequate to explain it. If you can answer this, you have a shot at extending or revising that theory rather than just applying it to a new area. And that's what the reviewers will be looking for.

7. Test out your ideas with working papers, conference presentations, workshops, etc – do not submit too early. Research is a process, and the great thing about that is there are lots of opportunities to get feedback on what you're doing before its too late. Take your time to see if your ideas have the potential for top tier publication before you commit to doing the research. And then as you're doing the research get feedback from the best people you can about your emerging results. Finally, circulate your work and get feedback before you submit to that tier 1 journal that rejects 90% of the papers it receives. You want to be as sure as possible that you're going to be in the rarefied 10%.

8. Beware of avoidable ‘incompetence cues’ . This is one that the former editor of Business Ethics Quarterly, Gary Weaver, always explained very convincingly. If editors and reviewers find sub-standard English, spelling mistakes, poor referencing, formatting that doesn't meet the journal's specification and other minor errors in a paper (especially in the first few pages) you are going to activate the editor's 'incompetence schema'. That is, he or she will already be thinking that you're in some way incompetent before they even get to evaluating your ideas. Don't risk it. Get the basics 100% right, every time, without fail. This will give your work the best chance it can of being judged in the way you want it to be.

9. Remember that reviewers are there to help you improve your work. The community of researchers around CSR and business ethics are a pretty collegiate and supportive group. But it can feel like completely the opposite when you're holding three reviews which all appear to rip your work to shreds ... but are still offering you the chance to resubmit something different (well, actually, better) in the future. But believe us, they do actually want to see your work published, so you just need to work with them, not against them. The most successful researchers spend almost as much time on revising their work as they on the initial preparation. Take criticism on the chin and use it constructively as just another stage in the research process. In the end, you'll appreciate the advice because it almost always improves your research if you're working with a good journal and good reviewers.

10. Get used to criticism and rejection – and don’t forget the bigger picture of why you want to publish in the first place. We all get bucketloads of criticism and we all get our work rejected. Its a part of the job as a researcher. Some people say that if you're not getting rejected from time to time, you're not aiming high enough. So don't take it personally. And remember, the reason you're putting yourself through all this is that you think the issues are important and that you have ways of thinking about it that need to be read. The best journals are regarded a good because they have a higher impact than the others. If you really want your work to be read by other researchers - if you want to leave a mark on the field - you'll need to face the trials and tribulations of aiming for the best journals. So grow a hard skin along with that smart mind and warm heart.

‘Baron zu Googleberg’

Our last blog looked at the role social media and other internet or mobile based communications technologies and their role in shaping a somewhat new, ideology-free form of revolution in Egypt. One of our readers hinted to Malcolm Gladwell’s comment on the web edition of the New Yorker which poured some water into the wine of excitement about the potential of new technology. And what we saw from Yemen, Bahrain and other Arab countries this week seems to add to the perspective: it is not just new media which makes revolutions inevitable. There are still a number of other factors which mediate the eruption and impact of widespread discontent in the Middle East.

On a different note though, last week has shown the power of the internet for holding politicians accountable in a somewhat new and quaint context. Since a couple of years, Germany has a new rising star in politics, the current Secretary of Defence Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (his real name runs over half a page of nobility titles and stuff – we spare you this). He is young (39), smart and eloquent, good looking, filthy (old money-) rich as a Baron with a long ancestry of Franconian nobility, boasts a beautiful wife and cute kids and so far has done quite a good job as a federal top politician in Berlin. He is well connected, also beyond Germany and one of the few German politicians who can actually talk coherently in English (then Industry Secretary). Many touted him for future Chancellor (German for Prime Minister).

Earlier last week though events took an ugly turn. Andreas Fischer-Lescano, a law professor from Bremen University, published a book review of Guttenberg’s recently published PhD thesis in some law review. Initially drawn to the work by scholarly interest – the book is a comparative study of constitutional law in the US and Europe – he had some strange déjà-vu’s while reading Guttenberg’s 435-page tome. He googled a few paragraphs which appeared familiar and as a result, he published in the appendix to his review dozens of passages, where Guttenberg had just copied and pasted newspaper articles, speech manuscripts and journal papers. Of course without any citation, any reference and without even mentioning most of them in his 50-page reference list. Immediately, an online community of bloggers and researchers zoomed in on the case. The immediately set up website ‘GuttenPlag Wiki’ so far has digged up around 120 alleged incidents of plagiarism in Guttenberg’s PhD.

Now one has to consider that in Germany carrying a ‘Dr.’ in front of your name - rather than indicating academic ambitions – is, however, by now almost a requisite to enter the higher echelons of politics and business. So getting the title by what now appears to be a thesis rampant with plagiarized parts is no small feat. No wonder this lead to widespread debate about whether such a cheating and disingenuous individual could still be in such senior political role. Especially as his brand was very much predicated on being ‘authentic’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘genuine’ – unlike all those clichés the public normally harbours about the political class. The glee about ‘zu Copyberg’, ‘Baron Cut-and-Paste’ or ‘zu Googleberg’ is limitless in European media.

Now the interesting thing about this is not necessarily the fact that we come across yet another sleazy politician. Fair enough, if the allegations are true, zu Guttenberg has cheated and there is no way he could keep his degree. More serious, it now came out that he also used the Parliamentary Research department and pasted their reports into his PhD - without any reference. In fact, suspicions that the whole tome was written by a Ghostwriter are now popping up all over the web. The Minister has announced on Friday: "I will temporarily, I repeat temporarily, give up my doctoral title." Crisis management German style.

The really interesting story in our view though is the pivotal role the internet has played in this case. The initial review in the law journal was only possible because some young guy in a provincial university was able to use Google and other software to detect plagiarism comprehensively. And the subsequent frenzy of research online which discovered even more incidents of plagiarism just put up the heat on Guttenberg. Politicians – like most of us these days – are so much more transparent and thus also accountable for their legacy and actions – just because technology empowers ‘normal’ citizens to access so much more information. One of the funnier incidents in cypberspace is the facebook page on this (‘If Guttenberg has a Doctor, I want one too!’) or the new keyboard designed for PhDs a la Guttenberg - with all keys removed except the 'c'ut and 'v'-paste ones...

The lessons from this are clear. Yes, it still matters how people think, what ethical convictions drive them and what values are held in high regard. For many other places in the world, this scandal just sounds a little quaint, German, parochial. In the Anglo-Saxon World, politicians are more prone to fall over irregularities in their love life. But the dynamics and the mechanics of political processes – be it the fairly prosaic plagiarism in the PhD thesis of a German politician or the far more substantial way of organising a revolution in Egypt – are fundamentally altered by the way we can access, process, analyse and distribute information these days. Kadhafi’s shoutdown of social media in Libya today just seems to underline this point.

Needless to say, that those cases also raises some challenging implications for private corporations, whose ethical behaviour now - just by dint of the technical means - faces a new wave of transparency. But that's a topic for a whole now blog, we guess.

Photo by isafmedia. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence.