Archive | October 2011

Characteristics of a High-quality Review

At this year’s CSCMP Conference in Philadelphia I joined a presentation about high-quality reviews held by the co‐editors in chief of the Journal of Supply Chain Management. Therefore, I’d like to remember their July 2010 editorial, Crafting High-quality Reviews: Guidelines, Examples and Feedback. While a reviewer should identify a manuscript’s deficiencies (“gatekeeper”), a reviewer should also provide suggestions for how these deficiencies can be addressed (“gardener”). The authors argue that a high-quality review should consist of five characteristics: The reviewer should (1) provide a brief summary of the paper at the beginning of the review, (2) convey a constructive attitude, (3) provide a list of specific comments regarding weaknesses and concerns about the manuscript, (4) ensure that an article that reports data takes either an inductive or deductive approach, and (5) assess the level of theoretical development in the paper. In addition, the editors of the Journal of Business Logistics have just provided a prescription for reviewing out of one’s own comfort zone.

SCM Best Paper Award Winners 2011

Best paper award winners can serve as a blueprint for one’s own research projects. Some of the leading supply chain management journals have now announced their winners. The Journal of Business Logistics has just announced that the paper Exploring a governance theory of supply chain management: Barriers and facilitators to integration by Richey et al. is the 2011 Bernard J. LaLonde Best Paper Winner and, thus, the most valuable paper presented in that journal. The papers awarded by the International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management, the International Journal of Logistics Management, the Transportation Journal, and the Journal of Supply Chain Management are B2B eCommerce: an empirical investigation of information exchange and firm performance by Porterfield et al., Measuring the importance of attributes in logistics research by Garver et al., Value propositions of the U.S. trucking industry by Randall et al., and Sustainable global supplier management: The role of dynamic capabilities in achieving competitive advantage by Reuter et al., respecitvely.