Submitted manuscripts should not have been previously published and should not be submitted for publication elsewhere while they are under consideration by SMJ.

To be sure that manuscripts move through the review process smoothly and quickly, we ask authors to observe basic formatting and style requirements when submitting manuscripts: 

Submissions that do not follow SMJ guidelines may have to be returned for revision and resubmission in order to ensure the timely flow of manuscripts through the editorial process. For more information, please review the SMJ style guidelines at the bottom of this webpage.

We suggest that you circulate your manuscript among colleagues before submitting it to SMJ and make revisions based on their thoughtful suggestions. The reviewers should not be your first readers.

All manuscripts considered for submission must be sent to SMJ’s online submission site, http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/SMJ. In case of questions, please contact:

SMJ Editorial Office
SMJ@strategicmanagement.net

SMJ is published by Wiley in partnership with the Strategic Management Society. Information about the journal is located on Wiley Online and the Society’s website.

For additional tools, visit Author Resources, an enhanced suite of online tools for Wiley InterScience journal authors, featuring Article Tracking, Email Publication Alerts, and Customized Research Tools.

SMJ does not pre-screen submissions. To evaluate your paper, it must be submitted online here. 

Once a paper is submitted, the editorial process is generally as follows:

• Each SMJ paper is assigned to a Co-editor. He/she does an initial review of the paper and decides whether to assign an Associate Editor. 
• The Co-editor or Associate Editor determines if the paper will go through the double-blind peer review process. 
• If the manuscript passes the initial review, the Associate Editor selects the reviewers based on the scholarly expertise and availability of potential reviewers. 

SMJ has a double-blind review process, which means the reviewers are not aware of the authors’ identities and vice versa. Only the assigned Co-editor, Associate Editor, authors, and the SMJ editorial office staff view the reviews. 

The SMJ Co-editors assign submitted manuscripts to Associate Editors based on the expertise of editors and the need to balance the workload among the editors. In the cover letter accompanying a submission, authors may request specific Associate Editors or reviewers with whom the authors have no conflict of interest. The Co-editors will make a good faith effort to honor requests but cannot guarantee that requests can be met due to the need to balance editorial and reviewer workload, as well as editorial discretion regarding the appropriate match of editorial and reviewer expertise to the submission.

The Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) holds to the “Guidelines for Professional Conduct” developed by the Society, which can be downloaded here.

See in particular, Point 10, “EDITORIAL AND REVIEW PROCESS.”

The following statement by the Co-editors of the SMJ reinforces the SMS guidelines:

The Strategic Management Journal strives to uphold the highest ethical standards in academic publishing.

• Reviews: Our Co-editors, Associate Editors, and editorial board members seek to provide timely, open-minded, and constructive feedback to authors of submitted manuscripts.
• Conflict of interest: Co-editors, Associate Editors, and editorial board members will not knowingly handle manuscripts that involve a conflict of interest (including in relation to any company and/or commercial product mentioned in an article).
• Plagiarism: SMJ will not knowingly publish plagiarized research, including that involving self-plagiarism. SMJ seeks to avoid self-plagiarism by asking authors of submitted manuscripts to cite all of their prior relevant research and disclose any overlap in data with their prior work. See the section below for more information about SMJ’s use of plagiarism detection software.  
• Data use: SMJ welcomes continuing development of new research from a database, but any new work must complement other research that uses the data.
• Unique submission: Authors may not submit a manuscript for consideration by SMJ that is under review at another journal. Authors will be required to provide access to editor and reviewers, if requested, to both data and programs during the review process for replication purposes. The Editor should be notified at the time of submission if access to the data and programming code used in a paper is restricted or limited, or if, for some other reason, the requirement above cannot be met.

More generally, SMJ requires that authors act ethically, including by appropriately citing prior research and accurately reporting data sources, procedures, and results.
 

Plagiarism

For every submission, SMJ uses CrossCheck’s iThenticate, a plagiarism detection software, to detect and quantify any duplicated text and possible plagiarism. To find out more about CrossCheck, please visit http://www.crossref.org/crosscheck.html.

Reporting results of statistical analyses

SMJ no longer accepts papers for publication that report or refer to cutoff levels of statistical significance (p-values). In statistical studies, authors should report either standard errors or exact p-values (without asterisks) or both and should interpret these values appropriately in the text. Rather than referring to specific cutoff points, the discussion could report confidence intervals, explain the standard errors and/or the probability of observing the results in the particular sample, and assess the implications for the research questions or hypotheses tested.

For papers accepted for publication, SMJ requires that authors explicitly discuss and interpret effect sizes of relevant estimated coefficients.

The SMJ editorial on “Creating Repeatable Cumulative Knowledge in Strategic Management” provides a more detailed explanation of these policies.

Replication studies and studies that report “non-results”

SMJ publishes and welcomes submissions of replication studies. SMJ's goal in publishing replications is to provide additional evidence that helps build a cumulative body of knowledge in strategic management, not to overturn prior results. SMJ is interested in replications that accord with prior findings as well as those that do not. 

For more information, please read the following editorials: https://doi.org/10.1002/SMJ.2581 and https://doi.org/10.1002/SMJ.2477.

Replication Reviewer Guidelines, which explain how SMJ evaluates replication studies, are available here.

SMJ publishes and welcomes submissions of studies with non-results. These types of studies demonstrate a lack of statistical support in a particular sample for specific hypotheses or research propositions. Such hypotheses or propositions should be straightforward and logical. Studies should be conducted rigorously and assess the robustness of the non-results, such as robustness to alternative measurement, statistical specifications, and estimation methodologies.

Articles on datasets

SMJ is now open to publishing peer‐reviewed articles on datasets. For dataset articles, SMJ is interested in datasets that are likely to attract significant interest from researchers, who can then exploit the data in a substantially broader fashion than was possible prior to publication. 

For more information, please read the following editorials: https://doi.org/10.1002/SMJ.2690 and https://doi.org/10.1002/SMJ.3000. 

Causal inference

SMJ strongly supports research that seeks to address interesting and important questions in strategic management that involve complicated causal processes. SMJ recognizes that statistical analyses relevant to these questions may raise the issue of endogeneity. If relevant, authors should acknowledge this issue in submitted manuscripts and make a good faith effort to address it. In some cases, causal inference may be impossible, but statistical correlations, especially if used to rule out some alternative hypotheses or mechanisms, may still be of interest. The SMJ editorial on “Quantitative Empirical Analysis in Strategic Management” provides a more detailed explanation.

Data snooping and p-hacking

SMJ strongly disapproves of data snooping and p-hacking practices in empirical research. Authors of submitted papers should not search databases for statistically significant coefficients with the intention of subsequently formulating hypotheses that fit the significant coefficients. Authors also should not adapt experimental designs with the primary intention of producing statistically significant results. In addition, authors of submitted papers should address the material significance (magnitude) of the results, in addition to statistical significance.

Open data initiative

Recognizing the importance of research transparency and data sharing to cumulative research, SMJ encourages authors to share the data supporting the results in their study by archiving them in an appropriate public repository. In partnership with the non-profit Center for Open Science (COS), SMJ will award qualifying authors an Open Practice badge recognizing their contributions to the open science movement.

The Open Data badge recognizes researchers who make their data publicly available, providing sufficient description of the data to allow researchers to reproduce research findings of published research studies. Qualifying public, open-access repositories are committed to preserving data and keeping them publicly accessible via the web into perpetuity. SMJ is making the FIVES Project data repository available to either store the data and documentation or provide links on the FIVES website to the data and documentation on other open access websites. Other example repositories include the Open Science Framework (OSF), the various Dataverse networks, and others listed at the Registry of Research Data Repositories. Personal websites and most departmental websites do not qualify as repositories.

There are, of course, circumstances in which it is not possible or advisable to share data publicly. For example, there are cases in which sharing participant data could violate confidentiality, or the data were acquired under non-disclosure agreements, or the data were acquired from private vendors or other entities that prohibit sharing their data. In these cases, the authors may provide an explanation of such circumstances in the Alternative Note section of the disclosure form. The information the authors provide will be included in the article’s Open Practices note.

Authors have an opportunity at the time of manuscript submission and again at the time of acceptance to inform themselves of this initiative and to determine whether they wish to participate. Applying and qualifying for the Open Data badge is not a requirement for publishing with SMJ, but this badge is further incentive for authors to participate in the open science movement and, thus, to increase the visibility and transparency of their research. Participating authors will be asked to complete a disclosure form after their manuscript is accepted; the badge cannot be awarded without the completed disclosure form.

More information on badges to acknowledge open practices can be found at the OSF Wiki here.

Copyright permissions

Permission Grants (PGs) are needed at the time of submission if the manuscript contains extracts, including illustrations, from other copyright works (this includes material from online or intranet sources). It is the author’s responsibility to obtain written permission from the owners of the publishing rights to reproduce such extracts using the Wiley Permission Request Form. For more information, please click here.

If your paper is accepted, the author identified as the formal corresponding author for the paper will receive an email prompting them to login into Author Services, where via the Wiley Author Licensing Service (WALS) they will be able to complete the license agreement on behalf of all authors on the paper.

For authors signing the copyright transfer agreement

If the OnlineOpen option (see below for more information) is not selected, the corresponding author will be presented with the copyright transfer agreement (CTA) to sign. CTA Terms and Conditions can be found here.

For authors choosing OnlineOpen

Online Open is available to authors of primary research articles who wish to make their article available to non-subscribers on publication or whose funding agency requires grantees to archive the final version of their article. With Online Open, the author, the author's funding agency, or the author's institution pays a fee to ensure that the article is made available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley Online Library, as well as deposited in the funding agency's preferred archive. For a full list of terms and conditions, see here. 

Any authors wishing to send their paper to OnlineOpen will be required to complete the payment form available from the Wiley website. 

Prior to acceptance, there is no requirement to inform the editorial office that you intend to publish your paper OnlineOpen. All OnlineOpen articles are treated in the same way as any other article. They go through the journal's standard peer review process and will be accepted or rejected based on their own merit. 

If the OnlineOpen option is selected, the corresponding author will have a choice of the following Creative Commons License Open Access Agreements (OAA):

• Creative Commons Attribution License OAA
• Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License OAA
• Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial -NoDerivs License OAA

To preview the terms and conditions of these open access agreements please visit the Copyright FAQs hosted on Wiley Author Services http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp and visit http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/details/content/12f25db4c87/Copyright--License.html.

If you select the OnlineOpen option and your research is funded by The Wellcome Trust and members of the Research Councils UK (RCUK), you will be given the opportunity to publish your article under a CC-BY license supporting you in complying with Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK requirements. For more information on this policy and the journal’s compliant self-archiving policy, please click here.

Note to contributors on deposit of accepted version

Funder arrangements: Certain funders, including the NIH, members of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Wellcome Trust require deposit of the Accepted Version in a repository after an embargo period. Details of funding arrangements are set out at the following website: http://www.wiley.com/go/funderstatement. Please contact the Journal production editor if you have additional funding requirements.

Institutions: Wiley has arrangements with certain academic institutions to permit the deposit of the Accepted Version in the institutional repository after an embargo period.  Details of such arrangements are set out at the following website: http://www.wiley.com/go/funderstatement.

Early View

SMJ is covered by Wiley’s Early View publishing service. Early View articles are complete full-text articles published online in advance of their publication in a printed issue. Articles are therefore available as soon as they are ready, rather than having to wait for the next scheduled print issue. Early View articles are complete and final. They have been fully reviewed, revised and edited for publication, and the authors’ final corrections have been incorporated. Because they are in final form, no changes can be made after online publication. The nature of Early View articles means that they do not yet have volume, issue or page numbers, so Early View articles cannot be cited in the traditional way. They are therefore given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which allows the article to be cited and tracked before it is allocated to an issue. After print publication, the DOI remains valid and can continue to be used to cite and access the article.

There is no fee for submitting manuscripts to SMJ. The only fees associated with publishing an accepted article are optional. 

These optional costs include:

• Color figures in print: The first color figure is $500, and subsequent color figures are $100 apiece. Color figures appear in the digital version for free.

This should be a separate file from the main document. Please list the full names, titles, email addresses, and affiliations (with complete addresses) of all authors on the title page. A running head (a short title of up to 60 characters) of your choice should appear on the title page as well. For indexing purposes, kindly include five (5) keywords that describe your paper.

Please double-space the body text (font size 12) and use one-inch margins. Do not include any author names, author affiliations, or acknowledgements in the main document. Please ensure that there are no edits (such as Track Changes and comment bubbles) showing in the text.

Please supply a one-paragraph abstract of up to 125 words. This is a precise summary of your entire paper, not just your conclusions, and it must be able to stand alone, separate from the rest of the paper. Please do not include citations to other works in the abstract.

The names of any sponsors of your research, including grant numbers and/or people you would like to thank, may be included in an acknowledgements section. When submitting a paper, acknowledgements should be included ONLY on the title page and not in the text of the paper. If your paper is accepted, the acknowledgements will move to the main paper, at the end of the text and right before the references.

Please do not incorporate your figures and/or tables into the text of your article. Please include an instruction such as “INSERT TABLE 1 HERE” where appropriate. Figures and tables should appear at the end of the manuscript, after the references section. Here are some additional guidelines regarding figures and tables:

• It is best if your tables are editable (not images).
• All tables and figures should be numbered and include legends. 
• Please use consistent lettering and sizing in original artwork.
• Each table and figure must have placement instructions within the body text to indicate where these items should go (e.g., “Insert Table 1 Here”).
• Figure files:
  • Should be in high resolution (at least 300dpi for printing purposes), and the following formats are preferred: .tiff and .png
  • Will appear in color online (if submitted in color) but will appear in black and white in print.

At the submission stage, SMS can accept files in Word and PDF.

• Before you submit your materials, you will be given the chance to review your manuscript as a PDF. Please review the PDF before submitting. If any part of the paper does not convert properly, please work on the formatting before submitting. 
• If the paper is not readable after the system converts it to PDF, we will send it back to you for formatting revisions.

Once your paper is accepted, we will request that files be provided in Word format (.doc, .docx, .rtf). 

• Tables must be included in an editable format, not as pictures. 
• We can also accept LaTex files at this point. If you choose to upload LaTex files, please ensure there is also a PDF that shows us the placement of the various pieces. 
• If you have an appendix intended to be online-only, it may be submitted in any format. Online appendix material will not be copy edited or revised, so please ensure it appears exactly as you would like. 

SMJ uses APA style. Use the author-date method of in-text citation. The author’s last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text; for example (Jones, 1998). If a direct quote is included, the page number should appear as well; for example (Jones, 1998, p. 182). 

When a cited work has six or more authors, the form (main author et al., year) is to be used. If there are five or fewer authors, all names should be included at the first text citation and et al. used thereafter. When reference is made to more than one work by the same author(s) published in the same year, identify each citation in the text in the following manner: (Collins, 2005a, 2005b). 
If necessary, cite unpublished or personal work in the text, but please do not include it in the reference list. When your parenthetical citation includes two or more works, order them alphabetically, separated by a semi-colon (Smith, 2002; Thompson, 1983).

All references must have a corresponding citation in the text and vice versa.

Reference style

A complete list of sources should appear in alphabetical order in the reference list at the end of the paper. 

For examples of the correct referencing style, please download the full author guidelines document and refer to page 13.

Appendices are placed after the references. If there is only one Appendix, no number is needed after it (i.e., Appendix 1). If you have an appendix that should be published online only, please call it the “online appendix” throughout the article. It should be a file separate from the main article.

SMJ generally follows APA style. For a brief summary of common style issues, please download the full author guidelines document and refer to page 15.

Every accepted SMJ article goes through copy editing, but this level of copy editing is very light. If your paper is in need of additional editing (improving the writing, grammar, punctuation, formatting, etc.), you may want to enlist the services of a professional copy editor. If you do not have access to a copy editor, you may wish to contact Wiley’s English Language Editing Services. Please verify pricing upfront, as it is not provided free of charge.