Taking Stock, with Gratitude

• Date: 01 January 2013
• Author: William Judge
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12011
• Published date: 01 January 2013

Outgoing Editorial

Taking Stock, with Gratitude

William Judge

It seems like just yesterday that I was composing my

“Incoming Editorial” back in 2007. It is hard to believe

that six years haveelapsed and my tenure has now ended as

the Editor-in-Chief of Corporate Governance: An International

Review (CGIR). A lot of good work by a wide variety of

incredible people has occurred since that time, and I’d like to

share my thoughts on our collective work, notable achieve-

ments, and dreams for the future of this journal.

As can be seen in Table 1, the journal started out as a

Blackwell journal, but ended up under the ownership of

Wiley when thatpublisher announced the purchase of Black-

well assets back in November2006 (Lenzini, 2006). Two years

later, we had an entirely new website with both organiza-

tions’ journals merged into a common platform. Fortunately,

Wileytook a relatively gradualand respectful approach to the

post-acquisition merger integration (from my perspective).

In the remainder of this editorial, I’d like to discuss some of

the changes experienced over the past six years as well as

thank the many individualswho worked tirelessly to help the

journal rise and to welcome our new co-editors.

SUBMISSION TRENDS

With the advent of online digital submission systems and

Asian scholars becoming increasingly active in the English-

language publication process, all journals have enjoyed

rather robust growth in submissions in recent years.

However, CGIR has experienced more than a doubling of

submissions during that period, which has enabled us to

become much more selective in which articles we can

publish. And while I am not privy to very many submission

statistics, I am told by some insiders that there are not many

journals whose submission base has grown that quickly that

fast. I believe that the increasing relevance of corporate gov-

ernance continues to fuel scholarly interest and readership

in our increasingly interdependent global economy. Further-

more, the rather high-prof‌ile governance failures by such

f‌irms as Lehman Brothers (USA), Barclays (UK), Parmalat

(Italy), Satayam (India), and Kelon Electrical Holdings

(China) keeps corporate governance on everyone’s mind.

Once a manuscript is submitted to CGIR, the senior edi-

torial team has been able to process more manuscripts in

faster timeframes than in the past. Specif‌ically, our initial

manuscript cycle time fell from an average of 92 to 48 days

and our approximate acceptance rate shrunk from greater

than 25% to less than 8% of all manuscripts submitted. From

my own experience as a scholar, nothing is more maddening

than an elite journal taking 180 to 300 days to provide feed-

back on an initial submission. Notably, the length and

number of our reviews has increased considerably, so that

authors have benef‌ited from relatively fast, high-quality

reviews even if their manuscript was not accepted. Further-

more, the citizenship of our corresponding authors grew

from 31 to 50 nations over this six-year period, so this reduc-

tion of cycle times did not come at the expense of the geo-

graphic diversity of our author base.

These remarkable trends were made possible through the

creation of the journal’s f‌irst set ofAction Editors (i.e. Screen-

ing and Associate Editors), and its f‌irst formal Editorial

Review Board (currently numbering 33). The Action Editors

(i.e., Ruth Aguilera, Huimin Chung, Igor Filatotchev,

Praveen Kumar, Eduardo Schiehll, Till Talaulicar, Hans Van

Ees and Alessandro Zattoni) toil almost daily on behalf of

the journal for no extrinsic compensation. This kind of dedi-

cation and professional service is inspiring to me, and this

group of scholars has served the journal with distinction

(along with former editors, Brian Boyd and Shaomin Li).

Furthermore, our team of review board members is a distin-

guished group of corporate governance scholars in their

own right, and has helped us to provide a more consistent

quality of review in a more timely fashion than in the past.

The publisher and the f‌ield of comparative corporate gover-

nance are all in your debt for this rather self‌less generosity

and professional dedication of time and talent.

PUBLICATION TRENDS

Over the past six years, CGIR has published fewer articles

and articles that are longer in length than in the past. Previ-

ously, the journal was publishing 50 to 60 articles in its six

issues. Now, the journal is publishing 30 to 40 articles for the

same number of issues each year. A second change is that

the journal wasprimarily an outlet for European governance

scholars in 2007. In 2012, the proportion of lead authors

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Corporate Governance: An International Review, 2013, 21(1): 1–3

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

doi:10.1111/corg.12011