And the winner of the outstanding and recommended article in the last ten years of CCIJ is ...

Citation

Elving, W.J.L. (2015), "And the winner of the outstanding and recommended article in the last ten years of CCIJ is ...", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-04-2015-0015

And the winner of the outstanding and recommended article in the last ten years of CCIJ is ...

Article Type: Editorial From: Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Volume 20, Issue 3.

Every year Emerald invites the editors of the journals to select the best papers of last year’s volume, the Emerald Literati Awards. For Corporate Communications, an International Journal, we select the best papers of last year’s volume by asking the Editorial Advisory Board to pick their top three. And, although response rates on this inquiry remain low (20-40 percent), the selected award winners always represent the best that has been written for the journal, although this is different from what is most read or downloaded.

The best article in 2014 (Volume 18) is by Allessandra Mazzei of the IULM University, Milan, Italy, for her article: “A multidisciplinary approach for a new understanding of corporate communication” (Volume 19, Issue 2, pp. 216-230). Recommended publications of last year’s volume are: Mario Burghausen and John Balmer’s article: “Repertoires of the corporate past: explanation and framework, introducing an integrated and dynamic perspective” (Volume 19, Issue 4, pp. 384-402) and Augustine Pang’s article with his colleagues (Volume 19, Issue 1, pp. 96-118) entitled: “Negotiating crisis in the social media environment: evolution of crisis online, gaining credibility online.” The best reviewer award of 2014 goes to Anne Ellerup Nielsen, of the Aarhus University in Denmark. This award is the commitment of Anne to the Journal, not only as a reviewer, but also as guest editor.

It is important to recognize and give awards for reviewers as well, they are of enormous importance for a scientific journal and significant for the corporate communication community. Looking back at the best reviewer awards (but every reviewer who is willing to give his or her colleagues feedback and is taking this job seriously should have an award), we gave these to colleagues in the UK, Denmark, Italy, Slovenia and Australia. There are no conclusions that can be drawn upon country of residence for reviewers, only a plea for everybody who is invited to review to take this job with precaution and take this job seriously. Imagine yourself as an author, you want the feedback to improve your work and you want the feedback for the possibility to see your work in print, besides getting feedback on your work. Scientific research has the privilege to be judged by colleagues, most of the time from other countries, that do not know you (double blind), but who are willing to read your work and comment upon it. It is the best way to ensure quality. A manuscript will not be published when a reviewer suggests rejecting the paper. The majority of the reviewers take their work seriously and provide detailed feedback. And they do this all voluntarily, to serve the community and try to help the authors in improving their work. This help might be editorial, but also suggesting additional literature or improving methods. I am proud to be editor of a journal where the reviewers take their work very seriously and am proud of serving that community for the tenth volume already!

When we make an analysis of the authors of the best papers in CCIJ in the last nine years (we started in 2007 with these awards) we can see various trends. First of all it shows the dominance of European colleagues in getting these awards. On a total of 24 awards, 17 are from colleagues from Europe, four from the USA, two from Australia and one from Asia. This might be related to the users of the journal, which in its nature might be more European than global, although our emphasis is on including every corporate communication scholar in the journal, also from regions that only recently joined the corporate communications community. We hope to see less dominance of European articles in the next ten years and an increase of other world regions. But as we reported before (Elving, 2010) corporate communication was in its origin an Anglo-Saxon-dominated field at the beginning of this century. In the last ten years the number of European scholars increased enormously and we hope that we are at the start of a global presence of authors from all parts of the world!

The topics of articles by the award-winning and highly recommended articles are also of interest. First of all, we see a dominance of crisis communications, but also a shift within this to internal crisis communication in the last years. Crisis communication is one of the most reported subjects in articles in CCIJ (Elving, 2010), followed by CSR communication and reporting. Internal communication remains an important topic, just as corporate identity, branding, reputation and stakeholders. Finally, we do see a significant numbers of award-winning and recommended articles on conceptual corporate communication, from models to future, but also from historical perspectives as one of the recommended articles in the latest volume shows.

These kinds of overviews are nice to present, especially when it is the last time that I personally are able to present these, since Volume 20 will be my last volume as editor in chief of corporate communications.

So finally, what is needed to win the best paper award, or to write a recommended article? One of the nicest things about the best paper award of last year’s volume is that she has won the recognition as best reviewer for the journal in the past as well. This seems like a good strategy, keep in touch with the content of the journal and know what your colleagues are writing about. Of course, rigorous research, robust methods and a good theoretical knowledge upon the subject and field of study are prerequisites as well. In the review process we have to point too many times to authors that on the subject of their study were other articles in CCIJ published and that they did not include these in their references, as a way of rejecting the state of the art in that particular field and neglecting the scientific discussion to some extent. To heighten the chances for acceptance in a journal, make sure you know about the recent debates in the journal of your choice for submitting your work to. Ignoring this will almost certainly lead to a rejection or a resubmission. This seems to be a lesson for every first year PhD student, but as practice shows, many forget about this lesson when submitting a manuscript.

Would it be luck to be listed in the top papers for a volume? To a certain extent, luck might play a role, because no one can start with a manuscript or research with the sole goal to write a Top 3 paper. But knowledge of all relevant literature helps of course, as well as choosing a topic that is seen as trending within the field. So probably if you are submitting work on relations between newspaper journalists and PR professionals your chances might become lower, since that topic seems to be out-dated, probably just as the presence of companies on second live will be seen as a non-trendy subject, but again you never know. The trends in corporate communication pinpoint at transparency, digital media, accountability, (online) crisis and changing relationships and media in internal communications. But that is no guarantee, and other trends might become visible in the next year. The best guarantee is, however, rigorous, robust research, based on the current debates with a strong theoretical underpinning within corporate communications and related fields.

This second last issue under my editorship is of course a very interesting one. First there is a paper by George G. Panigyrakis and Antigone G. Kyrousi on color effects in print advertising, which has been awarded for a CCIJ award at a Corporate and Marketing Communications conference in 2011 in Athens. It took a while before this paper finally came into print, due to a malfunctioning in the systems. The manuscript was accepted some time ago, but this was not visible in our systems. We sincerely apologize the authors about this and made revisions to the system to prevent this in future. The second paper is on the influence of green advertising during a corporate disaster by Charles D. Brodkin, Louis H. Amato and Christie H. Amato from the USA and deals with CSR communication during a crisis. The submission from Simone Mariconda and Francesco Lurati from Lugano, Switzerland, deals with an analysis of stakeholders, and they use a segmentation method for this. The contribution of Ansgar Zerfass and Muschda Sherzada from Germany deals with the chief corporate communication officers perspective, and conceptualizes strategy from a corporate communication viewpoint. The paper by Valerie Priscilla Goby and Catherine Nickerson of the United Arab Emirates deals with crisis perceptions in an Arab environment and especially the female viewpoint on crisis, which is different from the traditional western viewpoint we often read about. The last two papers deal with digital media, Mark Kilgour from New Zealand, with his colleagues Sheila L. Sasser and Roy Larke from the USA is about developing social media strategies from a commercial strategy into a social strategy. The paper by Jeanine D. Guidry, Marcus Messner, Yan Jin and Vivian Medina-Messner from the USA. Their paper deals with how large fast food companies are portrayed by customers and employers on Instagram. The last two papers deal with company slogans, by Syed Tariq Anwar, on the important topic to maintain the corporate identity and brand visibility, and on effective public speaking, by Claudio Baccarani and Angelo Bonfanti. Although public speaking is an important topic for corporate communicators, we seldom see research or articles about.

These papers ensure an interesting issue and illustrate the uniqueness and scope of our community. It also represents the very much-wanted global presence from the USA to New Zealand, United Arab Emirates and Europe. We hope you enjoy this issue.

Wim J.L. Elving

Reference

Elving, W.J.L. (2010), “Trends and developments within corporate communication: an analysis of 10 years CCIJ”, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 5-9