Note from the publisher

Citation

(2001), "Note from the publisher", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 5 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2001.26705daa.008

Note from the publisher

Emerald, the new name and vision for MCB UP Ltd

For 2002 the publishers of this journal will be changing their trading name from MCB UP Ltd to Emerald. You may wonder why! Well basically it is to reflect the success of our Emerald Fulltext database – our electronic database which, along with much other material, contains current and archival content of this journal. As a reader you'll almost certainly know the Emerald name because electronic usage of the material contained in our journals has doubled every year since 1996 and the trend continues. Here are some interesting statistics representing the performance of the Emerald database in 2000:

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  Nearly 1 million user sessions in 2000.

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  Over 5.5 million articles delivered to users in 2000 (more than 16,000 per day).

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  Between January 2000 and May 2001 the number of academic institutions with access to the Emerald Fulltext database more than tripled.

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  A total of 92 per cent of the world's top business schools choose Emerald journals and 93 per cent of them have contributed articles to Emerald journals ("top" business schools based on Financial Times business school rankings 2000).

Why are we telling you this? Well, partly to explain why this journal will look different in 2002 and why it will carry a new logo. We will be introducing a new logo and giving all our titles a new cover design for 2002 to reflect the Emerald brand. More importantly, however, frequently it is the case that the users of material published in our journals are also potential suppliers (authors). If you're thinking of submitting an article for an Emerald journal in 2002 please be assured that you will have the full reach of the Emerald Fulltext database on your side to ensure that your work reaches the widest, global audience.

Forthcoming in 2002

This issue features a report on the MAAOE 2001 conference. As part of the 2002 volume we plan to present some of the papers which featured at that event as a special issue of MBE. Our aim will be to encourage selected authors to develop their papers to add to the material they presented at the conference itself and incorporating thoughts and ideas contributed by the conference attendees and the editorial team of MBE.

In July 2002 the Performance Measurement Association will be holding the "Third international conference on theory and practice in performance measurement and management" in Boston, USA. This conference will be jointly chaired by Andy Neely of Cranfield School of Management and Rob Austin of Harvard Business School. Andy Neely serves as European Editor for this journal and we aim to include a piece from him in one of the early issues of the forthcoming volume to outline the nature of the PMA and give us some indication of what to expect from this conference. We hope to be able to bring the readers of this journal some of the most pertinent material from that event. As well as Andy, the publishers of this journal plan to have a presence at the event so, if you are attending, please look us up on the Emerald stand. One of the journal Editors also intends to make the journey. For further information on the PMA event please see the conference Web site at www.performanceportal.org/pma2002.htm

As indicated at the beginning of this piece the publishers of this journal, Emerald, are now able to monitor the electronic usage of the material presented in our journals. We are feeding back to the Editors some of the topic areas which have received greatest attention from readers. For example, in the 2001 volume of this journal the performance prism items from Neely et al., the strategic deployment series from De Feo and Janssen and the recent piece on the balanced scorecard were all particularly well received. Our aim in feeding this information back to the Editors will be to increase the potential of MBE to cover the topic areas which usage indicates are of most current interest to the readership of the journal.

If you have any comments about any of the above please contact either of the Editors – details on the inside front cover of the journal – or the Managing Editor based here at the publishers – John McHale jmchale@emeraldinsight.com