Developing Insights through Reviews: Reflecting on the 20th Anniversary of the International Journal of Management Reviews

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12219
• Author: Dermot Breslin,Caroline Gatrell,Katie Bailey
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 22, 3–9 (2020)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12219

Developing Insights through Reviews:

Reflecting on the 20th Anniversary of the

International Journal of Management

Reviews

This year marks a change in the editorial team at

the International Journal of Management Reviews

(IJMR). We bid farewell to Caroline Gatrell, who

steps down as Co-Editor-in-Chief, having been in

post since January 2014. In turn, we welcome Katie

Bailey who joins Dermot Breslin as Co-Editor-in-

Chief of the journal. Since becoming Editor-in-Chief,

Caroline has overseen a dramatic increase in the

journal’s reach and impact. Downloads of IJMR

articles have increased from 204,403 in 2014, to

428,600 in 2018. At the same, the journal’s 2-year

impact factor has almost doubled from 3.857 in

2014 to 7.6 in 2018. As IJMR reaches its 20th

anniversary,it is good time to reflect on the evolution

of the journal, and examine key turning points with

regards its positioning, aims and scope. IJMR was

founded in 1999 by Cary Cooper and Alan Pearson,

as a much-needed outlet for literature reviews in

the field of management and organization studies

(MOS). In the early days, authors included both early

career/doctoral students publishing literature reviews

from their PhD theses, and established scholars

taking stock of changes in a specific domain of study.

The journal’s positioning has evolved over the past

20 years, and its journey has been particularly shaped

by three key changes in editorial strategy.

The first of these relates to Allan Macpherson and

Oswald (Ossie) Jones’s call for reviews to adopt more

rigorous approaches (Macpherson and Jones 2010).

Macpherson and Jones (2010) emphasized the need

for review papers to be transparent in the approach

taken to review the literatures. Authors were thus

encouraged to include a discussion of their ‘research

methods’, so that readers could understand how the

review was completed, including decisions around

which papers to include in the review (Macpherson

and Jones 2010). Macpherson and Jones (2010) sug-

gested authors refer to Denyer and Tranfield’s (2009)

principles of transparency, inclusivity, explanation

and heuristic. Since then, there has been a greater

proportion of papers published in the journal which

are based on a systematic literature review (Tranfield

et al. 2003). Despite this increase, IJMR remains plu-

ralistic in its approach, and is indeed largely agnostic

with regards to the method used to complete the

review. Jones and Gatrell (2014) for instance high-

light the predominance of the ‘traditional narrative

review’, which is based on informal mechanisms for

organizing and analysing the literature (Hammersley

2001). They also identify and encourage other

approaches with origins in other disciplines, such as

meta-ethnography, meta-narrative, realist synthesis

and meta-analysis. Authors are invited to submit

whichever kind of reviewis most appropriate for their

subject, but are expected to justify their approach, and

to be transparent about their methods for selection.

The second change in the journal’s positioning re-

lates to Ossie Jones and Caroline Gatrell’s later move

away from descriptive reviews, i.e. reviews which

largely seek to synthesize a body of work. In this

regard, the increasing levels of rigour expected from

IJMR reviews does not substitute for the need to make

a contribution, by presenting new conceptual insights

or leaps forward in knowledge. As a result, there has

been a trend over the past 5 years to move away from

papers which seek only to review and ‘synthesize’ an

accumulated body of research (Baumeister and Leary

1997; Webster and Watson 2002) to papers which

explore and develop the ‘theoretical foundations’ of a

domain (Jones and Gatrell 2014; Websterand Watson

2002). This strategic shift was initiated around the

time of Macpherson and Jones’ (2010) editorial, who

suggested that the journal publish ‘papers of a more

conceptual nature’, provided they were ‘grounded

in a thorough discursive analysis and review of

the literature’. The move was further developed in

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