One of the best parts of serving as editor is having the opportunity to recognize and promote excellence in the journal. At the annual meeting of the Society for Business Ethics (SBE) in Boston, in August, we presented this year’s journal awards for outstanding article and outstanding reviewer; I recap those below. I also provide an update on metrics related to the journal’s impact.
Article Award
The process for selecting the outstanding article award winner began with nominations from the journal’s editorial leadership team of articles published in print issues during 2018. A committee of associate editors then reviewed the nominated articles, selecting a winner and also recognizing a runner-up. The committee this year consisted of Jeff Moriarty, Juliane Reinecke, and Andreas Rasche.
The winning article is “Doing Good Together: Competition Law and the Political Legitimacy of Interfirm Cooperation” (BEQ 28[4], 401-425), authored by Rutger Claassen and Anna Gerbrandy. The basic question this article addresses is whether competition law should remain focused on competition enhancing economic welfare, or instead be reformed to allow for acts of cooperation that are socially beneficial. In selecting the article, the award committee lauded its presentation of theory in the interdisciplinary spirit that is BEQ’s hallmark, blending insights from law with debates around legitimacy and corporate social responsibility, and doing so in a way that connects well to current and timely debates.
The runner-up article is “The Ethics of Affective Leadership: Organizing Good Encounters Without Leaders ” (BEQ 28[1], 51-69), authored by Iain Munro and Torkild Thanem. This article, which was part of a special issue on philosophical approaches to leadership ethics, reframes leader-follower relations through the lens of a Spinozian conception of ethics. In recognizing it as runner-up, the award committee described it as an excellent application of Spinozian philosophy, one that ties into contemporary leadership debates.
We, at the journal, congratulate these authors for their distinctive and noteworthy contributions to BEQ and to the field.
Reviewer Award
Each year at the annual SBE conference we recognize one individual who has served as an exemplary reviewer for BEQ over a period of recent years. It is an opportunity for us to highlight the crucial, yet often unheralded contributions that reviewers make to the success of the journal. This year, the award honors Lori Verstegen Ryan (San Diego State University), a member of our editorial board who, in reviews, consistently and expertly merges a constructive and developmental tone with direct substantive criticism. Lori is especially deft with revisions: more than most reviewers, she skillfully links her comments on a revised submission with earlier comments (both her own and those of editor and other reviewers). She is one of those reviewers who make an editor’s job easier and an author’s life better. And as I congratulate Lori, I also take this opportunity to thank all of you in our scholarly community who have lent time and expertise this past year writing informative and constructive reviews, without which we could not publish the high-quality scholarship that appears in our pages.
Journal Metrics
Each summer brings another round of citation statistics that purport to capture academic journal impact. Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (among the most prominent of these metrics) puts BEQ’s five-year impact factor at 4.529, its highest to date; on this measure, BEQ ranks third among fifty-four journals in ethics. BEQ’s latest Scopus CiteScore of 2.12 places the journal eleventh out of more than five-hundred journals in philosophy.
While, of course, an editor prefers to see these sorts of numbers go up rather than down, it is important to temper one’s appreciation with a clear-eyed sense of how these metrics can distort rather than enhance the meaning of what qualifies as first-rate scholarship, and what it means to be a high-quality journal publishing worthwhile scholarly work. In recent years, a large and growing consortium of publishers, societies, institutions, and individual scholars has come together in support of a Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA; see sfdora.org) aimed at fostering improved practices in the evaluation of research and limiting reliance on journal metrics for decisions regarding funding, appointment, and promotion. DORA’s aim is to advance assessment of research “on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published.” I am pleased to say that BEQ’s publisher, Cambridge University Press, became a DORA signatory this past July.
