Characterizing the Top Journals in Strategic Management: Orientation, Style, Originality, and Readability

This paper characterizes the top journals in strategic management forum with respect to their orientation, style, originality, and readability. Data for the study were obtained from the Emerald Management Reviews database of Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. We analysed the period between 1996 and 2003. The main conclusions to be drawn from the analysis include the increasingly clear research orientation and academic style of the publications. Harvard Business Review figured prominently for its practical orientation, a predominantly professional/journalistic style, together with its readability. The journals that stand out for their originality are Strategic Management Journal and Academy of Management Journal. Although academic, Academy of Management Review also occasionally includes papers with a professional/journalistic style. Finally, we compare experts’ views on the orientation and style of the journals with objective information gathered from the journals about their readership. We observed agreement in some of these, but noticed differences in Strategic Management Journal and in Administrative Science Quarterly.