Abstract
An important part of Organizational Psychology Review’s mission is to stimulate the development of high-quality conceptual analysis in organizational psychology, broadly defined. Part of the issue here seems to be that our field just does not have a well-developed understanding of what good theory is. Many people, authors as well as reviewers and editors, are struggling with the question of what makes for good theory and how to judge the contribution of a conceptual study. To help address this issue and develop our field’s “shared mental model” of good theory, OPR is launching a Special Forum on Good Theory. Special Forum contributions are invitation-only, and are written as essay-style opinion pieces. Special Forum contributions will be published one or two per issue and running for a series of issues. Ferris, Hochwarter, and Buckley (2012) is the first contribution to the Forum, published in the current issue.
Authors of Special Forum essays have been invited to reflect on the issue of what makes for good theory in a broad variety of ways, contingent on the message each contributor feels would be good to share with OPR’s authorship and readership. The broad brief is that the Special Forum provides OPR’s readership and prospective authorship with insights into what others would look for in conceptual studies. What is it that makes theory worthwhile to the field? (And what should be avoided?). We envision that this may result in both divergence and convergence in opinions and issues highlighted – it is our invitees’ call. What we hope the Forum will bring to OPR is food for thought and insights worth following up on in writing, reading, and reviewing conceptual work.
On a different note, it is OPR’s clear ambition to publish conceptual contributions not only in the form of “narrative” conceptual work, but also in the form of meta-analyses (see Humphrey, 2011, for a discussion of what we seek in a meta-analysis), and we are proud to present the first meta-analysis published in OPR – Mesmer-Magnus, DeChurch, and Wax (2012) – in the current issue. As discussed in more detail in my “inaugural” editorial (van Knippenberg, 2011), OPR also seeks to publish conceptual contributions in the form of substantive reviews of research areas. To this end, we have launched a Call for Review Proposals that would help lower the threshold for undertaking such a review (i.e., prospective authors would be invited to submit the review paper for publication on the basis of these proposals), and I am pleased to note that the first invitations to submit full review papers have gone out following up on this call and proposal submission. We have recently renewed this call for proposals, and are accepting proposals all through 2012.
Anticipating queries of prospective authors, a final issue that may be good to address in this editorial is the visibility of publications in OPR. As a journal that is only just starting its second volume, OPR cannot have an impact factor or be included in all possible databases. Publications in OPR can, however, have good online visibility – and they do. People can register for online access to OPR, and 4817 had done so already by August 2011 – people that are alerted to OPR content every time a new issue is published. Download statistics for OPR articles also indicate that as per August 2011 many individual papers published in the first two issues already reached downloads above more than 3000 or 4000 times for a total close to 20,000 times (top downloaded papers by August 2011 were Côté & Hideg, 2011 – 3095 times; Rupp, 2011 – 3152 times; and Stephen Humphrey’s editorial on meta-analysis – 4690 times). In the course of 2011 we have switched to Online First publishing, publishing papers online in fully citable form as soon as possible after acceptance for publication and prior to appearance in print, which means that work published in OPR will be available online as soon as possible. While some databases are conservative in that they require a long lead time to include content, OPR articles may already be found through such high profile tools as Google Scholar (where visibility will only improve as more OPR content appears and gains prominence). Through the more hidden editorial and review process, we have also come across several papers that are already citing OPR articles, speaking not only to their visibility but also to their impact. All these statistics and experiences are based on essentially the first two issues of the journal. It would thus not seem to be an overly optimistic prediction that not only are these numbers very telling about the great shape OPR is in, things will get even better. Publishing in OPR, your work will be noticed, your work will be downloaded, your work will be read, and your work will be cited.