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Why manuscripts are rejected: An analysis of JIS rejections.

Article Excerpt
This article presents an analysis of manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Information Systems (JIS) that were rejected during our three years of co-editorship (Spring 1999 to Fall 2001 issues). The final rejection letters to the author(s) were examined and for each paper up to three reasons for rejection were identified and rated in terms of severity. Lack of theory, weaknesses in design, and poor motivation were the leading causes of rejection. The two most frequently employed research methods were laboratory experiments and surveys, and these were rejected most often due to theory and design problems. The findings presented in this article suggest that AIS researchers should obtain feedback from colleagues at a very early stage in the research about the appropriateness of the theory and the research design, especially for laboratory experiments and survey research.

Keywords: accounting information systems research; analysis of rejections; research methods; flaws in research.

Data Availability: Data beyond what is presented in the paper cannot be made available for reasons of confidentiality.

I. INTRODUCTION

There are many examples of excellent research in the public domain. Unfortunately, there is relatively little information available regarding papers that do not survive the review process. Research and publication skills are chiefly gained through trial and error. However, useful insights can be gained by considering the errors of others. This article examines the shortcomings of manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Information Systems (JIS) that have led to their rejection. Information about rejected manuscripts and the most frequent causes for rejection rarely enters the public domain, since it is only the journal editor(s) and author(s) who are privy to such information. By sharing this "inside the review process" information we hope to reduce the trials and errors that must be negotiated for publication success (Daft 1995, 164).

The remainder of this paper consists of four sections. The next section describes the procedures of our analysis. We then briefly describe the common reasons for manuscript rejection. The fourth section presents our analysis and discusses our findings. The final section presents concluding remarks and suggestions.

II. PROCEDURE

Our analysis focused on rejected papers submitted to JIS during our three years of co-editorship (Spring 1999 to Fall 2001 issues). For each paper we examined our final letter to the author(s) and recorded up to three reasons for rejection. Our rejection letter to the author(s) invariably summarized the key reasons for rejection. The "final" rejection letters were in the first or second round of the review process in most, if not all, cases. Using nine categories of reasons for rejection (explained later), we also weighted what we viewed as the relative seriousness of the shortcomings in each rejected paper (i.e., the most serious flaw was assigned a "3," the second-most a "2," and the third-most a "1").

We classified the research method of each paper into the following six broad categories: laboratory experiment, survey, conceptual, case study, instructional case, and archival. The survey method (30 percent) and...

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