What Constitutes a Contemporary Contribution to Project Management Journal® ?

This is the first in a series of editorials designed to provide authors with guidance for future submissions to Project Management Journal (PMJ). We start this series with a discussion of the contributions PMJ prefers, influenced by the strategic intentions of the editors, as well as the demands of our readers. Subsequent editorials will address the rigor and relevance balance in light of the specific expectations for conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative submissions to the journal. The aim of this series of editorials is to increase transparency of the requirements and expectations for acceptable submissions in order to help authors successfully prepare their manuscripts for acceptance. One of the triggers for this series of editorials is the large number of desk rejects encountered since we took over as Editors-in-Chief at the beginning of 2018. About 60% of all submissions are desk rejected and not entered into the peerreview process. Reasons for desk rejection are no different from those mentioned by editors of other leading journals in business and management. These reasons include the lack of theoretical contribution, relevance for the readership, and quality of academic reporting. The issue of lacking a theoretical contribution is at the core of this editorial, as it applies to most of the rejected articles. The other two issues were addressed recently through an update of our author guidelines (available at http://journals.sagepub.com/home/pmx), where we also detail the submission and review process. We encourage authors to read and follow the guidelines carefully, adhere to academic reporting conventions, and ground empirical studies on clearly phrased research questions. Simple issues such as these easily compromise the credibility of a submission early in the process and may become decisive in our decision to reject or review. The revised author guidelines also provide more clarity on formalities, including the plagiarism check (done for every submission), the review process, and duties of the editorial office, editors-in-chief, departmental editors, reviewers, and authors. At their annual meeting of 2018, the PMJ Editorial Board made a strategic decision to sharpen the profile of PMJ in terms of publishing theory. A number of factors contributed to this decision, including the often discussed lack of theory in project management (e.g., Jugdev, 2004), which is often discussed at research conferences, such as IRNOP 2017 in Boston, Massachusetts. In combination with the perception by some academic circles that project management is a practical profession with little academic, and thus theoretical, bearing, issues of acceptance of project management as a standalone academic field arise. This discussion is, to a large degree, inappropriate, as there are well-established theories in this field. Examples include the theory of the temporary organization, where the top three articles alone have garnered more than 3,000 citations in Google Scholar (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995; Packendorff, 1995; Turner & Müller, 2003), or the formal theory of project management by Rodney Turner (e.g., 2006), to name just a few. To that end, the discourse should turn from discussions on a pressing need for a number of theories toward the development of mid-level theories that are interesting and integrative across disciplines (as proposed by Weick, 1989). Pfeffer (1993) showed that such an approach fosters discipline-wide consensus on paradigms, concepts, and worthwhile research questions, with the potential benefit of more efficient communication among scholars. In recent years, PMJ has focused on publishing interesting articles, as shown by the large number of special issues on a wide variety of contemporary subjects. This strategy has increased the impact factor from 0.5 to 2.7. The next natural step in journal development is to move from interesting articles to interesting plus theoretical contribution articles, as espoused by Colquitt and Zapata-Phelan (2007) in their empirical analysis of increased journal citation rates. They showed that the potential for higher citation rates per article increases when the topic of the article is perceived as interesting and simultaneously links to the existing knowledge of the readers—with the latter often being a precondition for an article to make it on the “to be read” list of academics. Hence, we are looking for articles that link PMJ’s current momentum on interesting articles