Over the last decades, there has been a remarkable growth in business and management research, with the Journal of Management Studies (JMS) holding a prominent position alongside other longstanding journals with a reputation for publishing rigorous and impactful scholarship.

Reviewing the last decade of research published in the journal, our paper analyses the journal’s reputation, types of articles published, diversity of authorship teams, and editorial innovations that have contributed to the Journal’s success over the years.  

Comparing the performance of JMS with other top management journals, we show how much the performance of JMS has improved compared to several of its counterparts. Most notably, according to the latest data shown in the Figure 1 below, the JMS‘s impact factor is now on par with the Academy of Management Journal’s and Administrative Science Quarterly’s, and only below the impact factor of the Academy of Management Review and Journal of Management.

Figure 1. Historical evolution of impact factor: JMS and other general management journals. Please visit this site to view this and other figures from the paper in interactive form.

As Christopher Wickert, one of the general editors at JMS, comments:

“We have been working hard to position JMS as a journal that promotes impactful research and in doing so generates theory with a purpose. Not for the sake of it, but as a means to better understand and explain important societal phenomena in the context of management. It’s great to see that our efforts have been paying off.”

Despite an increased competition in the arena of generalist management journals, JMS continues publishing on a broad scope of topics and disciplines with papers drawing from diverse methodological approaches. The journal has published a lot of work on entrepreneurship, innovation, sustainability/ CSR, inequality, and performance (including firm and employee performance). JMS papers commonly draw from institutional theory, resource-based view of the firm, stakeholder theory, agency theory, signalling theory, and sensemaking perspective.

We also observed a trend towards more international authorship teams with more diverse disciplinary backgrounds. The gender diversity of authorship teams has also improved, although most of the articles are still co-authored by men similarly to peer journals in our field.

More importantly, our econometric analysis of all JMS articles published over the last decade reveals that more diverse teams (in terms of internationality, interdisciplinarity, or gender) produce more impactful research (as proxied by subsequent citations). This supports current ongoing efforts by publishers and editorial teams to increase the diversity of scholarly contributions.

In the last decade, the JMS has both introduced several novel initiatives and reinforced the ongoing ones, such as running paper development workshops across the world to support early career researchers and those from less represented geographical areas with their writing for top management journals. The Society for the Advancement of Management Studies (SAMS), the governing body of JMS, offers generous bursaries and funding opportunities to facilitate the participation at these events. The JMS has also initiated novel type of submissions, such as “reflections” on classic articles that were published in the Journal as well “COVID-19 commentaries”, “thematic collections” and “point-counterpoint” exchanges that have further enriched the scholarship published by the journal.

Caroline Gatrell, one of the longstanding editors at JMS, notes that:

“JMS ranks highly among management journals; its most recent impact factor is 10.7! Our performance over past years shows JMS to be consistently agile and responsive to contemporary issues that impact society – an example would be our recent commentaries published as a timely reflection on the Covid pandemic. As a theory-oriented journal, JMS foregrounds novel empirical and theoretical approaches – combined with facilitating strong author voices and this is demonstrated through the wide and diverse variety of papers, essays and reviews that we publish.”

Overall, reflecting on these achievements, our review highlights the significance of JMS as a leading outlet in management and organisation studies. The journal has clearly attracted a vibrant community of international scholars who publish on diverse topics using a range of different methods.

Corinne Post, one of the general editors at JMS, concludes:

“Looking ahead, we are confident that our agility, the quality of our editorial processes, and our openness to explore new formats for sharing the most societally relevant and theoretically sound research positions us for continued growth and even greater heights moving forward.”