Our Commitment To Relevance

Our editorial operations are designed to both incorporate and prioritize practitioner-relevance alongside rigor. In particular, we only accept manuscripts that demonstrate relevance to management practitioners; at the core of our pre-publication checks is a stringent relevance criteria that manuscripts must satisfy; our publication process and artifacts as well as our post-publication open peer-review processes are designed with practitioners in mind.

Traditional scholarly management research publishing has historically contributed to the difficulty management practitioners face in accessing the content of management research as the traditional article format is scholar-friendly but not practitioner-friendly. For that reason we use a novel bipartite (dual) article format publication model in which we publish a practitioner-friendly and relevance-optimized article format we call Poomslays, alongside the traditional scholar-friendly article format to make the management research we publish equally accessible to management practitioners and management scholars alike. However, unlike traditional management research publishing, Poomslays (not the traditional article format) is our default and primary article format.

In addition to the prioritization of a practitioner-accessible manuscript format, at POOMS the content of all published manuscripts meet seven stringent management research relevance criteria that ensures that the scholarly information contained in published articles are both valuable (relevant & useful) to management practitioners and presented in a manner that is readily accessible to them. The seven article content relevance criteria we use are: descriptive relevance, currency relevance, goal relevance, operational validity, non-obviousness, clear and actionable advice/recommendations for practitioners, and grade 8 article readability level. See our How It Works page to learn more about these criteria.

One of the most important requirements for practitioner-relevance that management research must meet is timeliness. The traditional publishing process is characterized by long turnover times taking anywhere between 6 months and 3 years to get the findings of a research published. Given the increasing rate at which factors in today's business environments change, management practitioners cannot afford to play catch-up with their need for timely, actionable research insights. Therefore, to avoid the temporal shortcomings plaguing traditional publishing, we deploy a post-publication open peer-review process, that allows us to make research findings quickly available to management practitioners without compromising scientific rigor.