It is my pleasure to take this opportunity to share a few items of news with BEQ readers and contributors. We have some updated numbers on journal impact and reputation, and then I will recap this year’s article and reviewer awards.
Rankings and Impact
Recent months have brought annual updates to statistics that summarize academic journal impact. Among the best known of these is the Journal Citation Reports impact factor (published by Clarivate). I am pleased to report that data newly released in 2017 finds BEQ’s five-year impact factor at its highest point ever, a score of 3.881, which ranks 2nd among 51 ethics journals across all academic and professional fields.
We also have new Scopus CiteScore data (published by Elsevier). BEQ’s CiteScore of 2.51 places the journal 2nd out of 452 for philosophy journals, and is the highest of any ethics journal across all professional fields.
Je suis également ravi de partager avec vous une bonne nouvelle que j’ai reçue de la France. We recently learned that BEQ has been elevated in the ranking of peer-reviewed journals in business and economics that is maintained by the French Comité National de la Recherche Scientifique. In the latest CNRS ranking, which considers academic reputation, audience, and impact, BEQ is now a category 2 journal (highly selective journals publishing articles with significant visibility that make important contributions).
Article Award
At the annual meeting of the Society for Business Ethics (SBE) in Atlanta in August we presented the award for an outstanding article published in the journal in 2016 (volume 26). Nominations for the Best Article Award are offered by members of the team of BEQ associate editors. A committee consisting of associate editors Jerry Goodstein (Washington State University), Tom Donaldson (University of Pennsylvania), and Kelly Martin (Colorado State University) selected a winner and also recognized two runner-up articles.
The winning article is “Hierarchies and Dignity: A Confucian Communitarian Approach” (BEQ 26[4], 479-502) authored by Jessica A. Kennedy, Tae Wan Kim, and Alan Strudler. According to the award committee, this article stands out because the authors address a problem of both timely and timeless value to business ethics—how corporate hierarchies can be squared with human dignity. Confucian arguments are deftly woven together with Kantian ideas and Coasian/Williamsonian theorizing in ways that challenge conventional thinking about the relationship between hierarchy and dignity in the workplace. The article is not just theoretically rich with insight; it provides concrete, practical managerial implications, and, the committee noted, did all these things in a paper that is clear, logical, and beautifully written.
One of the runner-up articles is “Stakeholder Judgments of Value” (BEQ 26[2], 227-256) by Leena Lankoski, N. Craig Smith, and Luk Van Wassenhove. The award committee singled out this article as one in which the authors creatively integrate prospect theory as a foundation for developing a conceptual model of stakeholder subjective value judgments that incorporates stakeholder perceptions of value and utility. The model carries important normative, managerial, and research implications that have great potential for guiding future research.
The other runner-up article for the award is “Human Dignity and the Dignity of Work: Insights from Catholic Social Teaching” (BEQ 26[4], 503-528) by Alejo José G. Sison, Ignacio Ferrero, and Gregorio Guitián. The award committee appreciated this article for its reliance on Catholic Social Teaching, an overlooked reservoir of insights into problems of applied ethics, especially in relation to issues of poverty and dignity. The authors ground their broad discussion of work and dignity in an exploration of critical issues such as the right to work, workers’ rights and duties, and challenges of globalization—an analysis that the award committee found “enlightening.”
Congratulations to all of these authors for their accomplishments. It is one of the singular pleasures of the editor role to have the opportunity to recognize the excellent work by our colleagues that appears in the pages of the journal.
Reviewer Award
At the SBE meeting in Atlanta we also presented the award we give yearly to recognize an individual for outstanding contributions as a reviewer for BEQ.
The Best Reviewer Award is an opportunity for us to celebrate the crucial yet often unheralded contributions that reviewers make to the success of the journal. This year the winner of the award is Sébastien Mena (City, University of London), a member of the BEQ Editorial Board. We honor Sébastien’s service to the journal as a consistently excellent reviewer who combines high standards with insightful comments and developmental feedback. He is also one who agrees to review frequently and delivers on time. In additional to congratulating Sébastien, I wish to thank all who have given generously of their time and expertise over the past year to provide submitting authors with reviews that are informative, constructive, and timely. The journal couldn’t continue to enjoy its role and reputation as a leading multidisciplinary outlet for first-rate work in business ethics without you.
