This would be my considered response to your question. It appears in an Elgar volume on "Getting Published" from a year or two ago. I am firmly convinced that the long-term a) most successful and b) happiest academics will not be those who try to maximize their score according to the current, formal incentive system. Why? Because the current system always has flaws, and therefore will be changed to something else, with other flaws. Better focus on doing good, meaningful research that interests you!/Per
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Getting Published – and Cited – in Entrepreneurship:
reflections on Ten Papers
Per Davidsson
Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research,
Queensland University of Technology
and
Jönköping International Business School, Sweden
Background
I grew up in academic heaven. At least for me it was. Not only was Sweden in the late 1980s paradise for any kind of empirical research, with rich and high-quality business statistics being made available to researchers without them having to sign away their lives; 70+ percent response rates achieved in mail surveys to almost any group (if you knew how to do them), and boards of directors opening their doors to more qualitatively orientated researchers to sit in during their meetings. In addition, I perceived an environment with a very high degree of academic freedom, letting me do whatever I found interesting and important. I'm sure for others it was sheer hell, with very unclear career paths and rules of the game. Career progression (something which rarely entered my mind) meant that you tried as best you could and then you put all your work – reports, books, book chapters, conference papers, maybe even published articles – in a box and had some external committee of professors look at it. If you were lucky they liked what they saw for whatever reasons their professorial wisdom dictated, and you got hired or promoted. If you were not so lucky you wouldn't get the job or the promotion, without quite knowing why. So people could easily imagine an old boys club – whose members were themselves largely unproven in international, peer review publishing – picking whoever they wanted by whatever criteria they choose to apply. Neither the fact that assessors were external not the presence of an appeals system might have completely appeased your suspicious and skeptical mind, considering the balance of power.
I did not bother much about these things and naively believed that if I did good things – with high integrity – good things would happen to me. Rather than trying to understand the prevailing incentive system and maximizing my performance by its criteria, I did what interested me; what felt right, and what made sense to me. It is a philosophy I have basically applied throughout my career. That is, I haven't bothered much about politics, tactics, sheer rhetoric, bean counting, or the "Kremlinology" of putting in the right references and other cues to please potential editors and reviewers (or trying to tease out who they are). By my criteria this has worked wonderfully – which is not to say I could not have achieved more, had I sometimes been more thoughtful and careful about how I positioned and disseminated my research.
The academic culture I was brought up in, more precisely, was the Stockholm School of Economics – the elite business school in Sweden – and its department of Economic Psychology. I then spent four years at the still relatively young Umeå University, before moving to the entrepreneurship-focused academic start-up venture called the Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) in 1994. The system I saw was one with great academic freedom (and integrity). I was allowed to ask almost any research questions I came up with, using any methods I saw fit (and which were approved of somewhere in existing academic literature). It certainly helped that I was in an emerging field – entrepreneurship – where there was lots of virgin ground. But note that I was allowed to choose to enter this field; no-one tried to stop me from making this "risky" choice. The perception of existence of virgin ground was further helped by ignorance. The absence of the Internet, electronic repositories, and an agreed upon set of outlets to which "everybody that mattered" had access and paid attention meant that in essence, if you couldn't get it directly or indirectly through institution's library, it did not exist. It was a very different world.
Publishing in peer reviewed, international journals was optional, and we had little sense of a hierarchy of journal prestige or heard of impact factors, the H-index (it was not invented yet!), or anything like that. In Economic Psychology with its closer links to the underlying disciplines, journal publication was – thank heavens! – somewhat more on the radar screen than it was for other young management scholars, but there was no strong pressure. So I did not have to worry about maximizing the number of publications I got my name on; splitting up my work into "minimum publishable units", or spending much time "kneading the dough" in rounds of revisions – perhaps on papers I did not believe had that much important to say, anyway. Instead I moved on to the next thing that had triggered my curiosity. I enjoyed the luxury of leaving things be after writing a conference paper or research report – the point where I thought I had learnt what I could learn from that particular piece of research – only sending manuscripts to journals when I felt like it or thought I had something important to say. Besides, I was not very interested in having to listen to how others thought I should streak the brush when I composed my pieces of art.
I had my first real encounter with the US academic system and culture during an extended trip to three universities in 1991. I found them absolutely absurd. This goes especially for the obsession with numbers of works; I have later found reason to contemplate the strong emphasis on competition and relative disregard for true collegiality and having some intellectual fun, and the strong reliance on indicators like journal ratings rather than direct evaluation of contents. I remember on this first trip asking a dean what to me was a most obvious question: "Why don't you limit the number of works on which an applicant can base their application (so they can focus on doing deeper, better studies and you get less material to assess [naively assuming they would actually read the works of applicants rather than just scoring them based on proxy indicators])? The suggestion was so alien that he laughed out loud. As a matter of fact, after some 50 more academic visits to the US I still think aspects of the US-type research publication and evaluation system – to which I have never been fully subjected employment-wise as I have pursued my career in Sweden and Australia – are extreme, absurd, or at least unsound. I also fear that other parts of the world may currently be importing too much of it, and that we are and will be paying dearly for this in some respects. But there are two sides to everything. There is no perfect system, and the ideal system of academic publishing and promotion would probably be something in-between the US of today and the academic Sweden I grew up in. By the way, when moving to Australia I was baffled by a national evaluation system which assigned one point equally to every peer reviewed output, whether it was an award-winning paper in the Administrative Science Quarterly or some dodgy little conference the participants had colluded to arrange for the specific purpose of scoring points in this system.
An important drawback of the Swedish system I was part of during my early career was the incredible waste of not (regularly) taking research to such dissemination that international colleagues cold realistically learn from and build on it. As a case in point, one important reason that it took a while for Gregor Mendel's important findings on inheritance to catch on was that he published them in the local dust collector Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereins Brünn, where it was lucky to get cited three times over the first 35 years after its publication. We owe it to research funders and our colleagues to disseminate our research better; it is not just about satisfying one's own curiosity in the incredibly self-centered way the younger version of me did[1]. Further, if we want our colleagues to learn from and build on our research it is certainly fair enough that we be asked to subject them to tough scrutiny of our peers before they are accepted and published. I have come around completely as concerns appreciation for the peer review process. Sure, it isn't perfect, but arguably it is our most important tool for continuous competence development. It is by subjecting our work to the scrutiny of competent colleagues that we force ourselves to learn more theory, the latest developments in methods, and important findings that we may have missed in our own review, as well as helping us improve our writing skills. The biggest regret I have about the early years of my career is that had I been pushed more to (expand) my limits by sending more work to more competitive journals, I would have learned more and achieved more. It sure was nice to get all the positive feedback I got back then in my immediate environment, but some more "tough love" would probably have helped taking my scholarship to higher levels, or – if I have reached my maximum – to do so earlier. The lost opportunities to learn and develop are the other big waste of the system from which I came. And most Scandinavian colleagues of my cohort did much less than I did in terms of trying to get published in international journals.
This said, it is also worth emphasizing that I did certainly not need any sticks to put in 60+ hour weeks back then. That came from pure love of the work I was doing. This raises concerns about the extreme pressure and unrealistic expectations that are imposed on some junior colleagues of today by deans who have not done the math and expect their particular crew to take an unreachable percentage of the space in a small number of elite journals. Under such conditions, the perhaps arrogant young man I then was may not have chosen to stay in this game at all. In more general terms, by increasing the demands universities may end up not with better and more highly motivated young scholars; selection effects may lead to just the opposite.
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1) To be fair, through the 1990s I engaged in quite a bit of dissemination directly to policy makers, and it is not entirely without amusement or pride that I note that with around 100 GS citations each, some of our main reports – in the Swedish language! – fare better in this regard than do many entrepreneurship articles published in respected journals during the same era (Davidsson, Lindmark, & Olofsson, 1994; 1996).
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