Dear colleagues,
We suspect the form in which the first call was posted may have lead to some recipients missing the core contents, so here we co again:
We – Per Davidsson and Norris Krueger – are exploring the possibility of compiling and publishing a volume of “Lost Treasures in Entrepreneurship Research”. That is, we would like to highlight and bring to (new) life some of those scholarly works that for whatever reason have not yet received the attention they deserve considering their quality and importance. We have secured preliminary interest from a leading publisher in bringing such a volume to the market.
How many of you have used Alex DeNoble & Sandy Ehrlich's scale for entrepreneurial self-efficacy? Dozens of studies use that scale from a 1999 Babson paper that.... they could never get published. (We both have conference papers that people cite repeatedly yet remain unpublished - all of this really piqued our curiosity. What else is out there?) Other academic fields often do a better job of surfacing their “lost treasures.”
We now seek your nominations for works to include.
What we have in mind are:
1. Important, high-quality works that never got published because the authors left academe; did not themselves understand the significance of their work or its significance has only been revealed later on; got sucked into other projects; were fed up with rejections from overly conservative outlets and would not put it in a lesser one, or just did not care (it is not the case that everybody everywhere has always operated under the current, North-American publish-or-perish regime). Or did it just get deemed too “old and stale”?
2. Important, high-quality works that got published in “lesser” outlets because the authors were too modest or unaware of the journal hierarchy; because the authors were not able to “package” their excellent data and/or interesting results very well thus failing to explicate the rather obvious and important theoretical implications; or because the work was too radical; poorly timed or just a case of random bad luck with the better outlets; maybe they could not figure out how to position the paper. Maybe it was a voice that people were not ready to hear. Come on you who scorn journal rankings and the like—show us the great stuff that appeared in the ‘not-so-lesser-as-you-think’ journals!
3. Important, high-quality works that were both well-packaged and published in quite decent outlets, but of a kind that most of the entrepreneurship community would not find in the less digitalised world we lived in until recently. There are a lot of edited volumes out there that few of us have read. Alternatively, they were published at a time when the ‘conversation’ it engages was non-existent or at a low.
4. As a special note – think about papers that prove the worth of important theory that the field has still been slow to embrace (again a voice that needs to be heard). Think about works that offered us some great methodology but that have not been widely recognized.
5. Are there ‘Einstein’ articles out there? When they write articles on special relativity, do they still cite Einstein? Very often...it's no. "Everyone knows..." What are the seminal articles/authors in entrepreneurship that nobody cites any more, wlthough knowingly or not they use their insights?
6. What about articles in languages other than English? Here is where we actually could provide a HUGE service (worrying about translation later…that’s Norris’ job, anyway) What great stuff has only been published in Swedish, Finnish, French, Australian, Spanish or Japanese???
7. We are also considering a section of abstracts of articles that were "Forgotten, but not lost", i.e., articles that were published in quite decent outlets but haven't been used as much as you think they deserve.
If any of this rings a bell we would like you to nominate the paper or article in question for possible inclusion. If and when you nominate, please also include some rationale and “evidence” – e.g., an unusual number of citations for an unpublished paper; evidence that the work preceded and/or in some respect is ‘better’ than the later paper on the same topic that ‘gets all the cites’; evidence that the work had critically important influence on later, well-cited work, or the like. ALWAYS include a line or two, preferably verifiable, on how you personally have used the nominated work in your scholarship.
We've all got our own favorite “hidden gem” that we cite - time to share yours with the field!
Please send your well-considered nominations to:
per.davidsson@qut.edu.au AND
norris.krueger@gmail.com
Best Regards,
Per & Norris
p.s. Self-nominations are acceptable, but if you've got something that others are citing, ask them to also nominate it.
Per Davidsson
Professor in Entrepreneurship
Brisbane Graduate School of Business
Queensland University of Technology
Gardens Point Campus, Brisbane
4001 Queensland
Australia
Ph: +617 3138 2051
Fax: +617 3138 1299
email:
per.davidsson@qut.edu.au Australia's first MBA with the 'triple crown' of accreditation