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Editorial conflicts of interest & UKRIO's authorship guide

And OHN has 500 subscribers!

Stephanie Decker FAcSS FBAM

Oct 10

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Welcome back to another week in the fun factory (as we say in our house). News of the week is that OHN now has 500 subscribers — thanks, guys! I do love a good round number. I know this is not exactly virality in social media terms, but, you know, this is 500 people getting news about business and organizational history. Who knew there were so many of you out there?

But now, onwards to the more important matter of serious academic publishing.

This week, I attended an interesting webinar hosted by the British Academy of Management about conflicts of interest (CoI) in editorial practices and research integrity. Obviously, this is a very live issue and one that goes to the core of professional self-governance. The working paper is available on SSRN:

"Safeguarding Academic Legitimacy"

I often thought that some form of co-citation analysis would reveal some of what is going on. (To be fair, looking at some people’s Google Scholar tells you what’s going on.)

However, in this paper, the authors actually collected more than just citation information, including data from people’s CVs, bios and Google Scholar. Their definition of CoIs is extensive: they identify five types, one being a “possible CoI”.

While these definitions make sense in a relatively large field like business and management, I could not help wondering how many CoIs regularly occur in a small field like business history. Even when you do not have a CoI, you often know whose paper you are reviewing. (By the same logic, the authors might also recognise the reviewer, so “don’t be an asshole” is a key piece of advice here. Unless you are having a really really bad day…)

But, of course, the paper shows it’s more complicated than that, and as a paying subscriber, you can read on and find out why without reading the whole thing ;-)