Journal of Small Business Management—State-of-the-Art Reviews in SME & Entrepreneurship Research

Journal of Small Business Management Special Issue on

“State-of-the-Art Reviews in SME & Entrepreneurship Research: Structured Literature Reviews, Bibliographic and Meta Analyses”

Sascha Kraus, Durham University, UK (sascha.kraus@durham.ac.uk )

Raj V. Mahto, University of New Mexico, USA (rmahto@unm.edu )

Steven T. Walsh, University of New Mexico, USA (swalsh@unm.edu )

The growth of literature in a field may sometimes appear to counter the scholarly goal of developing a better understanding of dynamics among variables and contexts. The unplanned organic growth of the field may introduce or find many complex, competing, and sometimes counter-intuitive arguments and evidences that may prevent scholarly dialogue to advance. Fields advance when studies are designed in a way that builds logically based on the findings of prior studies. Such “review studies” then reconcile conflicting findings, identify research gaps in and suggest exciting new directions for a given field of research with reference to different methodology, theory and contexts.

One of the important purposes of this special review issue is to provide ideas and directions for budding research to undertake novel research, instead of doing replete and recycled types of research. Challenges emerge when research does not link systematically to the underlying body of knowledge. Thus, it is important in the design of new research for the researcher to have a state-of-the-art understanding of research findings (e.g., empirical generalizations) from the topical domain. Such review papers “are critical evaluations of material that has already been published” (Bem, 1995, p. 172), some that include quantitative effects estimation (i.e., meta-analyses) and some that do not (i.e., systematic reviews). They carefully identify and synthesize relevant literature to evaluate a specific research question, substantive domain, theoretical approach, or methodology and thereby provide readers with a state-of-the-art understanding of the research topic.

We therefore believe that such a research integration and synthesis provides an important, and possibly even a mandatory step in the scientific process. Review papers tend to include both quantitative (i.e., meta-analytic, systematic reviews) and narrative or more qualitative components; together, they provide platforms for new conceptual frameworks, reveal inconsistencies in the extant body of research, synthesize diverse results, and generally give other scholars a “state-ofthe-art”  snapshot of a domain, often written by topic experts (Bem, 1995; Hanssens, 2018).

High quality, structured literature review papers, bibliographic, and metaanalyses can provide this state-of-the-art understanding to scholars and thus play an important role in a discipline’s progress (Frank & Hatak, 2014; Jones & Gatrell, 2014; Kraus et al., 2020; Palmatier et al., 2018). We encourage scholars to review and synthesize widely used theories, contexts and methods in their articles. The objective of such reviews should be to identify research gaps and develop agendas for future research.

Papers accepted for this Special Issue seek to make significant conceptual contributions, offering a strategic platform for new directions in research and making a difference to how Small Business & Entrepreneurship scholars can conceptualize research in their respective areas. In reviews published in this Special Issue, the state of knowledge in a given area of SME Research is critically evaluated, and conceptual underpinnings of competing paradigms critically appraised, with a view towards advancing current and future research in the field.

We will publish three types of papers in this special issue: Structured Literature Reviews, Bibliographic and Meta Analyses.

Please submit your manuscript to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jsbm and indicate in the submission form that your paper is for this special issue.

Submission Deadline: November 30, 2020

First Revision: March 30, 2021

Second Revision: June 30, 2021

Final Date of Acceptance: September 30, 2021

Bem, D.J. (1995). Writing a review article for Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Bulletin, 118(2): 172.

Frank, H., & Hatak, I. (2014). Doing a research literature review., in A. Fayolle, & M. Wright (eds.), How to Get Published in the Best Entrepreneurship Journals. Chentelham: Edward-Elgar pp. 94-117.

Hanssens, D.M. (2018). The value of empirical generalizations in marketing. (Springer).

Jones, O., & Gatrell, C. (2014). The future of writing and reviewing for IJMR, International Journal of Management Reviews, 16(3): 249-264.

Kraus, S., Breier, M., & Dasí-Rodríguez, S. (2020). The art of crafting a systematic literature review in entrepreneurship research, International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal: 1-20.

Palmatier, R.W., Houston, M.B., & Hulland, J. (2018). Review articles: purpose, process, and structure. (Springer).