Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Finance, Innovation and Regional Development
Reviewer Guidelines for the Journal of Business Venturing
REVIEWER GUIDELINES FOR THE JOURNAL OF BUSINESS VENTURING
The reviewers and editor work together to offer authors high quality and timely feedback on their papers.
A high quality review includes addressing the following questions:
1. What are the strengths of the paper? Recognition of positive aspects of the paper helps start the communication with the author in a constructive, developmental tone. It provides the foundation for a conversation that can enhance the author's learning and help improve the quality of the manuscript. This is important regardless of whether you recommend to the editor to publish the paper or not. All papers have some positive qualities. Please acknowledge them.
2. Does the manuscript make a significant contribution to the field of entrepreneurship? Be specific about whether it contributes by addressing an interesting research question about an entrepreneurial phenomenon. Is the current conversation in the entrepreneurship community accurately represented? Is the author's approach well justified and does it provide new, non-obvious insights? If the answer is no to any of these questions, please provide some guidance on how the author can better motivate the paper and highlight its contribution.
3. Does it make a contribution to theory? It is not sufficient to highlight the importance of a phenomenon in the real world, the paper must also articulate how it advances our scholarly understanding by filling a gap in our understanding. Contribution can be made by empirically testing extensions to theory or theory building using top-down or bottom-up approaches. But there must be a contribution to theory. If the authors have not sufficiently articulated such a contribution, reviewers need to point it out and offer some recommendations for how this can be done.
4. Is the conceptual model adequate? Adequacy, in part depends on approach, but a theory is required (as in input or outcome) that justifies the variables and the relationships between them. That is, to be conceptually adequate the manuscript needs to describe the mechanisms underlying the hypothesized (or proposed) relationships. Sutton and Staw (1995) do a great job of explaining conceptual adequacy for top-down approaches and Eisenhardt (1989) for bottom-up approaches. Please point out when hypotheses (propositions) are not sufficiently justified and be specific about which aspects are missing or ambiguous.
5. Is the study technically adequate? For top-down empirical studies, does the method provide a sufficient test of the hypotheses? If not, detail your specific concerns and the actions the author can take to eliminate, or at least minimize, those concerns. For bottom-up studies, does the method collect and analyze data in a way that provides confidence that the resulting theory reflects those data? If not, please explain why specific aspects of the method cause concern and/or detail what additional information about the method is needed to
6. Is this paper appropriate for JBV? JBV is a multidisciplinary, multifunctional, and multicontextual journal that publishes interesting studies on all areas of entrepreneurship. If the paper is not interesting, then it is important to point out why and to look more deeply, more abstractly, more creatively to offer recommendations on how the authors could frame the paper differently or take a different theoretical tack that might make it more interesting. "Interest" is in the eye of the beholder and it is therefore important for you to articulate which aspects of the paper, if pursued by the authors, could make the paper more interesting. The paper must be about an entrepreneurial phenomenon. If it is assessed to be not sufficiently "entrepreneurial" then the reviewer needs to articulate why and perhaps highlight a current conversation in entrepreneurship that the authors could consider joining.
7. Is the presentation of the material clear? If it is not, please make some recommendations, for example, suggest where to tighten grammar, if a figure or table would help communicate ideas parsimoniously, suggest possible sub-headings, highlight leaps in logic, suggest possible structural rearrangements and so on.
8. Is your review constructive and development? After finishing a draft of the review please assess your review to ensure that where you express a concern with the manuscript that you also offer a suggestion and/or words of encouragement; ensure that the review has a respectful tone (acknowledging that this could be the authors first paper and yours his or her first reviewer comments); and that it does not provide a recommendation on the publishability of the manuscript in the comments to the author (such a recommendation should only go to the editor). Please make sure that your constructive, developmental review is not patronizing and condescending and focuses on the attributes of the paper and never speaks about the knowledge or motivation of the author. But also a constructive, developmental review is not soft in its comments to the author and harsh in its recommendation to the editor.
9. Has the review process been double-blind? If you know who the author of the paper being reviewed is, then this comprises the integrity of the review process; please contact the managing editor. If you find any evidence of academic transgressions by the author, please also notify the managing editor.
A timely review includes addressing the following questions:
Authors deserve a timely review process. Please respond promptly to invitations to review and please submit reviews before the deadline. We recognize that sometimes unanticipated events intervene, in such case, please contact the managing editor as early as possible so that we can remedial action.
We very much appreciate you reviewing for JBV. Thanks.
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