Editorial

Citation

Shapiro, D. and Oh, C.H. (2019), "Editorial", Multinational Business Review, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 2-3. https://doi.org/10.1108/MBR-04-2019-106

MBR editorial, 2019

It has now been two years since we assumed the positions of co-editors of Multinational Business Review (MBR). In our first editorial, we promised to sustain the MBR tradition of being a leader in “macro” IB and committed the journal to maintaining its reputation as a home for new ideas and thoughtful perspectives on current issues and controversies. At the time, we noted the first volume, published in 1993, contained papers on NAFTA, the prospects for a single European market, and political risks facing US firms abroad. Plus ca change.

We also noted at the time that that MBR was included in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), a step towards inclusion the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). We are proud to announce that MBR has now been accepted for inclusion the SSCI, and will receive its first impact factor in June 2019. This is of course good news that will enhance our reputation and will increase the number and quality of submissions.

We wish to express our gratitude to our editorial reviewer board members, authors, reviewers and readers, whose collective efforts contributed to this outcome. We will need your assistance more than ever to manage the anticipated increase in submissions and look forward to working with you all to continue to make MBR a home for innovative and thoughtful ideas.

As promised in our editorial two years ago, we have worked hard to maintain the original MBR spirit of directly and immediately addressing important issues, while taking steps to improve the ways in which this is done. Since the first issue of 2016, we have published one perspective paper per issue and will continue to do so. The authors of these perspective papers include David Ahlstrom, David Audretsch, Steven Globerman, Klaus Meyer, Snejina Michailova, Jennifer Oetzel, Roger Strange, Jan-Erik Vahlne, and others. The topics of these perspective papers address timely issues including anti-globalization, Industry 4.0, modern slavery in global value chains, and the economics of peace, with all of them linked to the literature on international business and multinational companies. Some of these perspective pieces have more than 5,000 downloads and several have received significant scholarly attention.

We also promised to pay more attention to under-represented countries and authors. We published papers on countries such as South Africa, Malaysia, and Pakistan, and in 2017-2018, published papers whose authors came from 17 countries. We also published a special issue on the theme of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in China. China is hardly under-represented in the IB literature, but the nature of its entrepreneurial and innovation actions remains a topic of current relevance.

We have tried to be responsive to our authors by ensuring that first-round reviews are completed within two months of initial submission. We have been sensitive to reviewers by desk rejecting some 70 per cent of submissions, on average within a week.

As a result of these actions, the number of submissions, downloads, and citations have been dramatically increased. According to Scopus CiteScore, whose calculation method is very close to that of the SSCI impact factor, MBR’s CiteScore in 2017 was 1.71. Other journals whose CiteScores are similar to MBR in 2017 received SSCI impact factors around 1.5. In 2018, the CiteScore improved to 2.49.

These results, with acceptance by SSCI, will certainly mean that the next years will be exciting ones for MBR. In addition to the anticipated increase in the number and quality of submissions, we will continue to pursue the objectives outlined in our first editorial. In 2019:

• We will continue to publish timely and relevant perspective papers on a regular basis. As we noted in our previous editorial, “These perspectives articles will be for the most commissioned, with paper development assigned to an editor as well as peer reviewers. However, we are also willing to accept proposals for such pieces. We prefer studies that critically address topical, relevant, and understudied phenomena. We would particularly welcome perspectives from other disciplines including economics, sociology, political science, geography, history and economic development.”

• We will continue to pay attention to under-represented countries. A special issue on Latin America will be published in 2019, and we are happy to entertain proposals for new ones.

• We hope to publish two new special issues to celebrate our inclusion in SSCI, with the themes of “Looking Forward and Looking Back”. We will be calling for papers, particularly review and perspective papers that reflect on the evolution of international business and the theory of the MNE, and help us to move forward. We hope to include many of the authors who have significantly contributed to MBR in the past.

• We continue to believe that sophisticated replication studies that contribute to understanding the reliability, breadth and validity of current knowledge are important. We also encourage the submission of exploratory studies that evaluate or identify phenomena without testing specific hypotheses.

• Finally, we encourage the submission of review studies that integrate traditional IB thinking with theoretical developments outside of business and management, including those that use bibliometric methods.