Where does business research go from here? Food-for-thought on academic papers in business research

This essay focuses on some of the adverse practices in business research publications. First, business researchers seem to have lost touch with business practice and to narrow the target group to fellow academics only, reducing the production of useful knowledge. Second, the objectives of business research publications narrow to impact and citations. This view leads to a strict focus on path-breaking theories and a denigration of replication and qualitative studies. Third, an obsession with the .05 significance level and corroborating findings leaves researchers with full file drawers of unpublished papers and could leave journals with a high rate of type I error papers. Fourth, complex, lengthy articles, the importance of carefully crafting a story around the research and a variety of style guidelines make business researchers less productive than they could be. Finally, a blind reliance on ISI's impact and citation scores may not do justice to a researcher's real contribution.