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The study aims to provide an analytical overview of current innovations in peer review and their potential impacts on scholarly communication.

The authors created a survey that was disseminated among publishers, academic journal editors and other organizations in the scholarly communication ecosystem, resulting in a data set of 95 self-defined innovations. The authors ordered the material using a taxonomy that compares innovation projects according to five dimensions. For example, what is the object of review? How are reviewers recruited, and does the innovation entail specific review foci?

Peer review innovations partly pull in mutually opposed directions. Several initiatives aim to make peer review more efficient and less costly, while other initiatives aim to promote its rigor, which is likely to increase costs; innovations based on a singular notion of “good scientific practice” are at odds with more pluralistic understandings of scientific quality; and the idea of transparency in peer review is the antithesis to the notion that objectivity requires anonymization. These fault lines suggest a need for better coordination.

This paper presents original data that were analyzed using a novel, inductively developed, taxonomy. Contrary to earlier research, the authors do not attempt to gauge the extent to which peer review innovations increase the “reliability” or “quality” of reviews (as defined according to often implicit normative criteria), nor are they trying to measure the uptake of innovations in the routines of academic journals. Instead, they focus on peer review innovation activities as a distinct object of analysis.

Over the last ten years (2010–2019), the amount of nonperforming loans (NPLs) has been more than tripled in the banking industry of Bangladesh. Thus, this paper explores the behavioral dimensions, which contribute to the NPLs.

By analyzing social, cultural, psychological, political, economic, internal control mechanism and law enforcement contexts of Bangladesh, this study identifies nepotism (NE), moral hazard (MH ), inadequate collateral (IC), poor credit assessment (CA), lack of proper monitoring (LPM), repayment flexibility (RF), business risk (BR) and lending interest rate (LIR) as the catalysts of raising NPLs. Next, a structured questionnaire survey has been performed in Bangladesh among bank officials who closely work in credit risk management, credit supervision, corporate finance and loan recovery department. Finally, partial least squares (PLS) path modeling, a variance-based technique of structural equation modeling, is used in this study as a statistical tool to analyze the data.

This study finds that moral hazard problem, lack of proper monitoring, inadequate collateral and nepotism have significant positive impact on the raising of NPLs. Unfortunately, this study does not find any statistical significance of poor credit assessment, business risk and repayment flexibility on the NPLs in Bangladesh. Finally, this study reveals that lending interest rate has significant positive impact on the NPLs. Hence, this study concludes that domestic lending interest rate is not lower enough, and so this double-digit interest rate affects negatively to loan repayment.

This study concludes that moral hazard problem of borrower, lack of board independence, lack of proper monitoring, form and extent of collateral, management lobbying, indecorous personal guarantee by management, dependent-independent directors and nepotism are extensively contributing for occurring NPLs in Bangladesh. These noninstitutionalized stimulators should adequately be scrutinized by regulatory bodies, policy makers and banks. Besides, LIR needs to be decreased in a convenient level for mitigating NPLs.

This study is the empirical evidence of behavioral dimensions related with the growth of NPLs in Bangladesh by taking direct response from knowledgeable bankers.

This study aims to enrich the current theoretical debate on the growth of start-up firms by extensively investigating the ongoing empirical studies in this research stream. Moreover, this study identifies drivers whose support roles are confirmed in the literature and recommends further research opportunities.

In this study, we analysed the results of 316 empirical studies on start-up firms and growth and also identified and categorised 66 growth drivers. We presented these drivers in three-dimensional charts: 1) the frequency of using each driver in the 316 studies, 2) the consistency of each driver as measured by the number of studies supporting its statistical significance and 3) the net effect (positive or negative) of each driver on growth.

Our analysis compares extant studies on growth drivers and shows some under-explored growth factors of start-up firms.

Both start-up managers and policymakers can benefit from this study. This study provided managers with a fine-grained tool on the main growth drivers and can guide policymakers in supporting policies for start-up firms.

This study provides a rich, fine-grained and coherent picture of several potential growth drivers of start-up firms. Moreover, we extended our analysis to various potential drivers more than previous studies on this topic, thereby providing fruitful insights into the critical growth factors for start-up firms.

This paper investigates the development of efficiency and the progress of banking integration in the European Union by checking for convergence among banks of European and Eurozone countries as well as contrasting the results with those of United States banks.

Initially, we employ the two-stage semi-parametric double bootstrap DEA method, which absorbs the effects of possible integration barriers in the measurement of efficiency. Afterwards, we apply a panel data model, in order to investigate the process of banking integration by testing for convergence and for convergent clusters in banking efficiency.

Our main findings show that the bank efficiency of the US is considerably higher than that of the Eurozone and the European Union. Although there is no evidence of convergence across the banking groups, our results indicate the presence of club convergence. We also conclude that the US banking system is closer to convergence than the Eurozone and the European Union banks. Nevertheless, this outcome is subject to change in the future due to the fact that Eurozone and European Union banks' speed of convergence is higher than that of US banks.

Our survey is unique in trying to check for convergence while controlling for country-specific and bank-specific factors that affect the efficiency of European and Eurozone banks. Moreover, recent literature does not compare the convergence of efficiency of Eurozone, European and US banking. Finally, in our paper special consideration was given to the comparison of commercial, cooperative and savings banks, as subsets of our banking groups.

With the growing need for employees to be innovative, public-sector organizations are investing in employee training. This study aims to examine the effects of a combined Lean Six Sigma and innovation training, using action learning, on public-sector employees’ creative role identity and innovative work behavior.

The authors studied a public service agency in Singapore in which a five-day Lean Innovation Training was implemented, using a combination of Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools, with a simulation on day one and subsequent team-based project coaching, spread over six months. The authors administered pre- and postintervention surveys among all the employees, and initiated group interviews and observations before, during and after the intervention.

Creative role identity and innovative work behavior had significantly improved six months after the intervention, enabled through senior management’s transformational leadership. The training induced managers to role-model innovative work behaviors while cocreating, with their employees, a renewal of their agency’s core processes. The three completed improvement projects contributed to an innovative work culture and reduced service turnaround time.

Starting with a role-playing simulation on the first day, during which leaders and followers swapped roles, the action-learning type training taught all the organizational members to use various Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools. This nimble Lean Innovation Training, and subsequent team-based project coaching, exemplifies how advancing the staff’s creative role identity can have a positive impact.

Intellectual capital (IC) is believed to be more important resources to add the value of a company rather than physical assets. This gives rise to the increasing practice of reporting IC information in corporate annual report. Over the past fifteen years, considerable numbers of studies have employed content analysis to examine the extent and nature of IC information in several countries, but they presented different results. These results might partly contribute to different methods in counting information. In fact, the previous studies have been critised for not explicitly clarifying how information was recoded and counted which led to incomparable findings. Therefore, this paper firstly seeks to discuss an illustrative example of ‘sense-making‘ process in identifying, categorizing, and counting of IC information in annual reports of pilot sample company. Secondly, the method refined in the pilot study was applied over the final samples of six large companies in the UK from 1974 to 2008 The contribution of this paper is to primarily refine the previous method in recoding information, to send a message that transparency is crucial in content analysis and to facilitate method replication for future studies. Overall, this study demonstrates a marked increase in IC information disclosure was identified over the 35 years. The relational capital information disclosure was relatively more prominent over time, followed by human capital and structural capital.

This paper aims to ascertain whether and to what degree universities are becoming organizational actors globally. Utilizing an original dataset of a sample of 500 globally oriented universities, we explore how universities have increasingly become organizational actors as is the case of American universities. We consider the following indicators of university transformation into organization actors: development or institutional advancement, diversity or inclusion, legalization, and internationalization goals and structures. We find that these globally oriented universities have created international, development, and legal offices. Surprisingly, nearly half of the universities in our sample also have diversity offices. These “getting organized” indicators are somewhat similar to what holds for American universities, suggesting that there is globalization of organizational actorhood among universities. At the same time, however, we find that there are pronounced regional differences, especially when it comes to organizing around diversity and legal affairs.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to develop the college-attendance value scale (CAVS) in the Taiwan context to understand undergraduates’ reasons for or benefits from college education, and to examine how the value relates to additional motivational goals, academic performance, and expected terminal degree.

Data analyses involved sophomores (n=729) who completed a learning-experience survey that included CAVS of the personal value and collective value subscales, expected terminal degree, Achievement Goal Questionnaire, and cumulative grade point average (CGPA). Construct validity evidence was substantiated by the results of exploratory factor analysis (n=364) for two-factor identification, and by the results of confirmatory factor analysis (n=365) for a good model-fit.

The interrelations between variables in regression analysis supported the predictive validity; achievement goals were predictors of CGPA, while personal value was a sole predictor of expected terminal degree. Findings suggest that CAVS is a predictive measure for Taiwanese undergraduates’ academic performance and choices.

In terms of policy implications, college students’ values of college attendance should not only be regularly investigated by institutional research, but should be widely applied by university students, educators and administrators to facilitate the optimal learning development for each undergraduate.

The study develops a short but effective scale of college-attendance value for the Taiwanese students who usually attend college after graduating from high school. The CAVS is useful in manifesting the students’ major reasons for pursuing college education.

Leadership development has been viewed as a foundational component of agriculture education and the FFA since the early 20^th century (Hoover, Scholl, Dunnigan, & Mamontova, 2007). To contribute to previous research in the field of leadership, this study lays the framework for future studies on the leadership styles of those individuals who lead today’s youth in FFA programs across the State of Texas. This study describes FFA advisors of successful FFA programs in terms of their leadership styles, leadership training/educational background, and suggests how FFA advisors could use their leadership styles to improve their programs. Participants reported engaging in behaviors related to transformational leadership, M = 3.15, more often than those related to transactional, M = 2.45, or laissez-faire leadership styles, M = 0.86

The typical approach of modeling the aerodynamics of an aircraft is to develop a complete database through testing or computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The database will be huge if it has a reasonable resolution and requires an unacceptable CFD effort during the conceptional design. Therefore, this paper aims to reduce the computing effort required via establishing a general aerodynamic model that needs minor parameters.

The model structure was a preconfigured polynomial model, and the parameters were estimated with a recursive method to further reduce the calculation effort. To uniformly disperse the sample points through each step, a unique recursive sampling method based on a Voronoi diagram was presented. In addition, a multivariate orthogonal function approach was used.

A case study of a flying wing aircraft demonstrated that generating a model with acceptable precision (0.01 absolute error or 5% relative error) costs only 1/54 of the cost of creating a database. A series of six degrees of freedom flight simulations shows that the model’s prediction was accurate.

This method proposed a new way to simplify the model and recursive sampling. It is a low-cost way of obtaining high-fidelity models during primary design, allowing for more precise flight dynamics analysis.