Editorial: Focus on emergent countries as an unintended (and fruitful) internationalisation strategy

Citation

Hourneaux Junior, F. and Hamza, K. (2022), "Editorial: Focus on emergent countries as an unintended (and fruitful) internationalisation strategy", RAUSP Management Journal, Vol. 57 No. 1, pp. 2-5. https://doi.org/10.1108/RAUSP-02-2022-265

Launched in 1947, RAUSP Management Journal is the oldest journal in Management in Brazil (Tonelli, 2017). Nevertheless, only in the past five years has our journal published articles exclusively in English. This new practice has led us to several significant upsides and new challenges throughout its implementation. In the following pages, we will address the two sides and their consequences (not all of them previously planned).

Upsides from RAUSP Management Journal’s internationalisation

We can say that our journal has undoubtedly evolved a lot during the last few years. The most crucial evidence for this conclusion is the increase in our indexes. We saw an extraordinary rise in the Citescore index, from 0.4 in 2019 to 2.3 in December 2021, and a moderate – but still very positive – increase in JCI from 0.25 (2019) to 0.36 (2020), the highest among Brazilian management journals. Other significant performances in current indexes are SJR (0.24), SNIP (0.612) and H-Index (4).

Another meaningful accomplishment was the inclusion of RAUSP Management Journal in the SCOPUS list in 2019, the largest database of peer-reviewed literature (scientific journals, books and conference proceedings) (Scopus, 2021). Besides, in 2021, our journal was included in the Academic Journal Guide (AJG, known before as “ABS List”), which is a rating system from the Chartered Association of Business Schools (the origin of the previous ABS acronym). It considers journals metrics and consultations with experts, peers and scholarly associations in each subject area. It is a well-known reference for management researchers when looking for good outlets to publish.

Consequently, these achievements have led us to increase the internationalisation of our journal. Table 1 shows the evolution in terms of the origin of the articles’ authors. In 2018, most of the submissions were from Brazil, and 17 other countries represented only 18% of the submissions. At the end of 2021, around two-thirds of the articles were foreign from 31 different countries, confirming this internationalisation trend.

Challenges faced in the internationalisation process

As we get more visibility in the international academic community, new challenges arise. One of them is how to guarantee a good quality of the English language in the articles? This issue has been a constant concern both for journals and researchers themselves, especially when they are non-native speakers (Horn, 2017), which is the case of the majority of the authors who choose our journal as an outlet for their publications. Actually, this issue is so relevant that there are outlets exclusively dedicated to non-native English speakers (see https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-second-language-writing).

We will keep focusing on intensifying and diversifying this international strategy for the next few years. Nevertheless, most authors will still be coming from non-native English language countries, leaving us with this challenge on how to care about the excellent quality in terms of language. To minimise the language issues, we require the authors to send us documents to certify that the manuscript has been proofread. Besides, we have a final check done by a hired service.

Another challenge we face is keeping a high-quality review process and offering the academic community good articles that help build the management theories, especially considering the realities outside the western and rich countries. So we step up to Mason and Merga (2021) invitation for researchers worldwide to read and cite articles beyond the so-called “top journals” and diverse contexts.

As the number of submissions grows, we also face the challenge of increasing the number of international associate editors and reviewers and decreasing the time needed between article submission, acceptance and publication. In this matter, we invite colleagues interested in collaborating with RAUSP Management Journal to contact us to become part of our community.

Focus on emergent countries: an unintended strategy

After these first stages in our internationalisation process, one thing has become clear: our journal has been turned into a target for authors from emergent countries. Figure 1 presents the number of manuscripts submitted in 2021 according to the authors’ country of origin. Again, the diversity of the author’s nationalities is noticeable, with India and Indonesia as the most frequent countries (after Brazil, as already expected).

We can notice that our journal has been positioned as an outlet for this particular profile. The countries listed in Figure 1 are almost all emergent countries. Interestingly, researchers from these countries have looked for a journal from another emergent country to publish their work. As mentioned before, possibly the similarities among these countries and the context where the research is done can explain these authors’ interest in our journal.

Furthermore, as the number of submissions grows, we have also noticed an increase in the quality of the articles. If at the beginning of this internationalisation process almost all foreign articles were desk rejected due to low quality, more and more we noticed an improvement in the submissions, and consequently, a higher rate of acceptance year by year. For instance, only in 2021, 12 articles from foreign authors were accepted during the review process; three were written in partnership with Brazilian researchers, and nine were exclusively from foreign authors.

In short, we understand that RAUSP Management Journal has been seen as a target and an alternative for authors from emergent countries publishing good quality research. And we intend to be seen this way continuously.

Final comments

This is 2022’s first edition. The readers who have not looked for our guidelines for authors may not know that from 1st January 2022, the original manuscripts must be submitted only in the English language. Our former instructions allowed submissions either in English or Portuguese, provided that the authors present an English version of the text after acceptance.

Nevertheless, as more than three-quarters of the received manuscripts are already submitted in English, we want to take a new step in our internationalisation process and receive manuscripts already in English. With this change, we expect to cut down the publication span, given that a translation step would not be necessary anymore. We are conscious that our submissions may be reduced in the short term, but we expect to achieve today’s numbers soon and overcome them shortly.

Figures

Figure 1.

Authors’ countries referring to article submissions in 2021*

Table 1.

Evolution of international × domestic authors (%)

Origin of the articles’ authors	Year
	2018	2019	2020	2021*
Brazil	81.6	65.8	56.3	40.6
Other countries	18.4	34.2	43.7	59.4
Total	100	100	100	100

Note:

*Articles received until 20th December 2021