Where do we go from here? Food for thought on academic papers in business research

In this paper I comment on some of the adverse practices in business research publications. First, we seem to have lost touch with business practice and have narrowed our target group to fellow academics only, reducing the production of useful knowledge. Second, the objectives of our publications are narrowed to impact and citations. This leads to a strict focus on pathbreaking theories and a denigration of replication and qualitative studies. Third, an obsession with the .05 significance level and corroborating findings have left researchers with full file drawers of unpublished papers and could leave journals with a high rate of type I error papers. Fourth, complex, lengthy articles, the importance of carefully crafting a story around our research and a variety of style guidelines make us less productive than we could be. Finally, a blind reliance on ISI’s impact and citations scores may not do justice to a researcher’s real contribution