BE:ER is beyond suppression

To say that the release of journal impact factors is the Oscars of the academic world is a bit of hyperbole. Yet, we know that it is with great anticipation that many natural science and social science journals await the annual “reveal” of Clarivate's Journal Impact Factors (IFs) each June. And, now as many of you know, it was quite a shocker for us this year as BE:ER's IF was suppressed due to our self-citation (Clarivate Analytics, 2020). The BE:ER community of authors, associate editors, publishers, and us co-editors have experienced a wide range of intense emotions beginning with confusion and befuddlement, then moving to anger and shame and more recently, onto resolve and candor. In this editorial, we plan to share our experience as a portal to a bigger discussion about academic impact. While the suppression is about BE:ER, both this conversation and the consequences are truly much bigger and much more unseemly about us as a broader academic community. First, we provide a summary of the details of how we got on the “naughty” list to begin. Next, we will offer a whirlwind tour through alternative quality metrics. Lastly, we will discuss our recovery plan. You will get through this editorial real and honest insights from what is known to be a small circle of dedicated co-editors, for a well respected journal, and our journey over time, as well as our expectations of a resounding recovery from this temporary setback. The Clarivate IF tracks the number of times a published article has been cited in any journal that is part of the Web of Science (WoS) collection. While there are various versions available, the one that is most commonly used is the 2-year IF—for any given review period, it captures how often the average research article has been cited that had been published in the 2 years prior to this period. To take the example of BE:ER and its recent IF performance, the 68 research articles that were published in 2017/2018 attracted a total of 259 citations in 2019, which would have resulted in an IF in the area of 3.8 had it not been suppressed. At least this is what we assume our IF for the 2019 JCR window to be (or to have been): there are a number of open questions regarding the exact calculations underlying the IF, for example, in relation to how review articles or papers that have an “early view” status are taken into account. Since Clarivate Analytics does not disclose the exact formula that is used, we can only provide a rough estimate for our performance—in particular given that Clarivate's calculation method apparently has been revised for the most recent review period. Moving on to the self-citation ratio—and hence the reason we ended up on the “naughty” list—this ratio expresses the percentage of WoS citations that stems from our own journal. In other words, the number of times BE:ER research articles published in 2017/2018 were cited by BE:ER papers published in 2019, divided by the total number of citations across the entire WoS universe (including BE:ER). For BE:ER, Clarivate has established a self-citation ratio of 52%. We acknowledge that the self-citation rate is high, but it has been at this level throughout the last 5 years (and thus throughout the period and even before members of the current editorial team started at BE:ER). Based on our calculations, the self-citation rate has peaked in the 2017 JCR window (53%) and has in fact decreased in the JCR 2019 window. We were, therefore, very surprised that Clarivate decided to suppress our IF this year—without prior warning. In addition, there are a number of factors to consider when interpreting the self-citation ratio. First, academic outlets that are not part of the WoS universe are not considered. In other words, journals without a Clarivate IF or inclusion in the A&HCI/ESCI, working papers and other types of gray literature, edited books, and others are not taken into account. This is a problem we share with most social science journals, leading to a lower IF as well as a higher self-citation ratio. Second, we are a relatively small, explicitly interdisciplinary journal spanning a broad range of topics and disciplines—as such, we are home to a number of smaller and relatively distinct academic communities, both in terms of topics (e.g., CSR and development; responsible HR, corporate governance) and geographies (e.g., with a particularly strong presence in Spanish-speaking countries). Both of these factors are likely to naturally inflate our self-citation rate (with small academic communities directly interacting with each other's work). Third, not least given its title (Business Ethics), BE:ER is commonly seen as the little sibling of older and generally more established business ethics journals such as Journal of Business Ethics (JBE, Springer) or Business Ethics Quarterly (BEQ, Cambridge University Press). At the same time, BE:ER articles are most frequently cited by journals such as Sustainability (MDPI), Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management (Wiley), and Journal of Cleaner Production (Elsevier). On the one hand, this illustrates the interdisciplinary scope that is partially distinct from JBE and BEQ. On the other hand, we believe that the absence of JBE and BEQ citations is hurting our self-citation rate—which is something we, of course, cannot control. Fourth, we have been working very hard to close the gap between BE:ER and these more established journals such as JBE and BEQ. We are certain that the quality of BE:ER manuscripts has improved fundamentally over the last 5 years. Downloads of BE:ER papers have almost doubled between 2015 (73,000) and 2019 (125,000), and are very likely to increase again in 2020 (70,000 downloads between January and June 2020). The quality of papers we published in 2019/2020 is certainly better than anything published in BE:ER before. Hence, we have also seen an increase in our IF between 2015 and 2019 as a logical consequence of this systematic improvement in quality. At least for a number of years, this quality enhancement may then also impact self-citations negatively—given that authors submitting to BE:ER will, to varying degrees, engage with the existing discourses in the journal (and thus they are more likely to cite recent high-quality papers published in BE:ER before the wider academic community does). In contrast, given the relatively slow pace of the review process in most social science journals (Jamali, Barkemeyer, Leigh, & Samara, 2020), the “success” of a research paper as measured by citation in other WoS-listed journals would mostly fall into the period after the 2-year time-frame of the Clarivate IF and the corresponding self-citation ratio. Our 5-year IF increased by 111% between the 2015 and 2018 JCR releases, from 1.621 to 3.423. Fifth, as a smaller outlet with typically four issues published per year, our self-citation ratio is driven by a very small number of papers that have attracted a lion share of self-citations (e.g., seven papers accounting for roughly half of all self-citations in the 2019 JCR window). Ironically, some of our efforts in working to improve the quality and visibility of BE:ER have turned out to negatively impact our self-citation ratio. To take one example, the Special Issue commissioned by Jamali and Carroll (2017) on CSR in Developing Countries was explicitly intended to draw attention to BE:ER and to generate discussion within our journal and beyond. This SI alone accounts for roughly one third of all our self-citations in the 2019 JCR window (46 out of 147). Again, there is no escaping the fact that BE:ER has a high self-citation ratio as calculated by Clarivate Analytics. 52% for 2019 is a high level, and presumably also higher than for a lot of other journals operating in this space. However, we firmly believe that this is the result of the factors spelled out above—rather than a reflection of an artificial inflation or even an attempt to manipulate the IF of BE:ER. Given the above mentioned insights, and while we will be working diligently on monitoring and reducing all self-citations and reclaiming our IF the soonest, we would like to draw attention to alternative indicators of the quality of BE:ER, which show without a shred of doubt that we have worked holistically and wholeheartedly on the journal and its advancement on many fronts, and that this is most correlated with different measures of quality. In 2019, our rejection rate was at 87.4%, illustrating the highly selective nature of our review process. Moreover, as shown by the downloads rate, the journal is attracting increased attention from the academic and practitioner community, which reflects the upward trend in the quality of published papers during the past 5 years. In the 2019 release of the CiteScore metric, based on Elsevier's Scopus index, we scored 5.4 which placed us comfortably in the first quartile of our two assigned subject categories. This CiteScore release reviews the citations received in 2016–2019 to articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers published in 2016–2019, and divides this by the number of publications published in 2016–2019. Our journal has a global reach, to 6,639 institutions in 2019, across Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, and the rest of the world. Moving on to our recovery plan, we are working diligently on several fronts. On the short-run, we are preparing a rebuttal letter to be sent to Clarivate urging them to reconsider their decision based on the information outlined above. We feel obligated to ask since those authors who have been in cue for publications may potentially be punished by their efforts if our ranking is suppressed. This is not a trivial matter as academic work takes time to develop and work through the review process. While we object to IF as a foundational metric for faculty performance evaluation, we feel suppression without warning is excessively punitive for our authors. Also, we find it a bit unfair not to receive prior warning about our potential high self-citations and the need for taking corrective measures while other journals have received such warning and will be taking corrective measures accordingly. In the medium term, we are working on setting up several social media platforms where the best BE:ER papers are featured and advertised. We are also planning email newsletters where we feature the best papers published in BE:ER along with asking our authors to actively promote their papers on their social media platforms and in conferences and other academic meetings. Going further, we are planning meetings with Associate Editors aimed at improving the review process while also working actively and relentlessly with the BE:ER community in terms of increasing the visibility and impact of the journal. We are also actively working on recruiting well-established and committed Associate Editors from all over the world that can help further promote and develop both the journal and the papers published in it. In the longer term, we have previously started discussions with several ranking institutions (ABS, ABDC, and CNRS) to increase the ranking of BE:ER. We have done so successfully in the French context, with BE:ER being promoted from category 4 up to category 3 in the recently published 2020 CNRS ranking. A big thank you to all of our Francophile colleagues who supported our submission! Initiatives such as this one will further increase the visibility and impact of BE:ER, which will also likely increase the external citations that the papers receive. We are also planning several Special Issues with renowned Guest Editors on topics that have a high impact along with a Review Special Issue, which are likely to attract a significant number of external citations. We are keen on decreasing our self-citations ratio, which, again, was a result of perfectly innocent intentions, while actively working on increasing visibility of the journal and its papers. Finally, while the suppression of BE:ER's IF was both surprising and disappointing, we understand that such incidents are not unlikely to happen in our field and that other journals have successfully regained their IF within a short period of time (within a year). For example, Organization & Environment, which is a key outlet in the (corporate) sustainability field, lost its IF in 2014 (for the same reason as BE:ER), but regained the category the very next year and even with a clearly improved IF. In the meantime, we will try to turn this threat into an opportunity, by trying to adjust the title of BE:ER during this contested transitional period, to alleviate the unfair geographic denomination, and make it more reflective of the actual scope and content of the journal. So we will use whatever IF downtime we have to change the title of BE:ER from Business Ethics: A European Review, to Business Ethics: Environment and Responsibility. In essence, we are confident that the self-citation ratio of BE:ER is the result of a number of natural factors as well as perfectly innocent intentions—rather than a reflection of artificial inflation or even an attempt to manipulate the IF. As an ethics and sustainability journal, we take these matters very seriously and are concerned about the spillovers of this decision on the trajectory of the journal overall, but more importantly, on the confidence of our authors. We know that we have worked incredibly hard over the past years, to re-position BEER and put it on a sustained trajectory of improvement and innovation and that the effort that we have put will pay off, no doubt, in terms of regaining our IF the soonest. So BE:ER is beyond suppression, and we are already looking beyond this temporary suppression or setback. We count on our readers and authors and community to support us in active ways in this non-impossible mission. We know we will recover, and we will come out of this stronger, together. If you truly believe that BE:ER is a worthy journal, then we ask you to support it in conscious and active ways during this coming year, which is absolutely critical. We are counting on you and have taken the liberty to share our story here with you in full transparency. There is much learning that lies within, and a wider story about academic impact, within an artificially constrained set of boundaries. We hope that the lessons learned based on our own experience will be beneficial and of added value to the larger academic community.

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