Academics who publish frequently in two top business journals often have prior working relationships with the editors who handle their papers, according to a new analysis of editor-author relationships at the two publications over the last 15 years.
One journal editor in chief called the results “concerning,” while another thought the analysis was looking for problems on purpose.
The authors of the analysis, Vitali Mindel of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and Raffaele Ciriello of the University of Sydney in Australia, told Retraction Watch in a joint email they had set out to do a bibliometric study of “superstar” scholars in business research. The goal: “to understand the secret sauce behind exceptional productivity and success.”
But as they explored their data, they noticed pairs of authors and editors who supported publishing each other’s work “at striking rates.”
“What started as an incidental observation quickly became impossible to ignore,” they wrote. “So we decided to subject it to empirical scrutiny.”
For their analysis, available as a preprint, they focused on two unnamed elite business journals that disclose the identities of handling editors for published articles. Both journals make the Financial Times’ list of the 50 journals it uses to rank business schools.
Using the 1,585 peer-reviewed articles published in the two journals from 2010 through 2024, Mindel and Ciriello identified 54 academics who had each published at least 10 articles in those years. Although their combined 783 articles amounted to nearly half of all those published in the two journals in the time period, the “elite cohort” of 54 authors represented only 2.4 percent of the over 2,000 authors whose work appeared in the two journals in the study’s timeframe.
Mindel and Ciriello also found 90 percent of the frequently published authors had earned their Ph.D.s from North American institutions, and nearly 95 percent were men.
Next, Mindel and Ciriello analyzed the relationships between the 54 authors and the handling editors for each of their papers. They looked for potential conflicts of interest, such as whether the authors and handling editors had coauthored papers together, accepted each other’s articles at journals with public metadata, or had professional ties.
Of the nearly 1,000 pairs of authors and handling editors, Mindel and Ciriello found at least half had at least one identifiable potential conflict of interest, with about 40 percent of the author-editor pairs having accepted each other’s papers. Their findings suggest editorial conflicts of interest “are not isolated anomalies but pervasive features of elite journal governance,” Mindel and Ciriello write in the preprint.
With some business schools offering specific rewards for publishing in top journals – including cash bonuses, relief from teaching, and quicker promotions – academics may be incentivized to exploit editorial conflicts of interest, Mindel and Ciriello say. After posting their preprint, the pair expanded their analysis and found only two of the top 60 authors lacked apparent conflicts of interest. While the absence of evidence of conflicts of interest doesn’t guarantee none exist, “these cases show that legitimate excellence is still possible,” Mindel and Ciriello told us.
While it’s not unexpected to find that who you know matters in academic publishing, Mindel and Ciriello told us they were surprised by how frequently they found editorial connections coinciding with publication in the two prestigious journals. And yet, their findings are likely “only the tip of the iceberg,” they said, because most journals don’t disclose the editors that handle particular articles.
“If patterns this strong appear in the public record, one can only imagine what remains hidden behind closed doors,” they said.
Mindel and Ciriello elected not to name the authors, editors, and journals whose work they analyzed. “Our paper doesn’t aim to point fingers but to fix systemic dysfunctions,” they told us. “Editorial conflicts of interest are not isolated lapses but institutionalised patterns of failure stemming from misaligned publication incentives.”
They hope their findings encourage reforms such as more journals publishing the names of handling editors for articles, routine independent auditing of editorial conflicts of interest, or even just journals applying the policies they already have.
The findings presented in the preprint matter because “the practices described here will lead to narrowing of the literature to reflect the views of an elite minority,” sleuth Dorothy Bishop told us in an email. Unless new scholars are connected to a member of the elite, they “will be crowded out.”
Mindel and Ciriello also documented that studies associated with editorial conflicts of interest have fewer citations. “If one takes citation as an indicator of quality,” Bishop said, “it suggests lower quality of those papers.”
Bishop isn’t aware of any analyses of publications in other fields as detailed as that found in Mindel and Ciriello’s preprint. “The authors argue persuasively that the pattern they observed is driven by social dynamics that are universal and so you should see something similar in other fields unless specific measures are taken to counteract them,” she said.
Marc Gruber, the outgoing editor-in-chief of the Academy of Management Journal, a title on the Financial Times’ list that publishes handling editors for articles, told us in an email he thought the preprint showed a “deliberate quest to identify some wrongdoing, and the tone can be more balanced.”
Gruber, a management professor at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, also said he thought the authors could have more explicitly considered the conflict of interest guidelines journals have. His journal has a “very clear, formal” policy that each editor handling a paper needs to adhere to, and he expects many others do as well.
Kris Byron, the top editor of the Academy of Management Review, which also ranks on the Financial Times’ list and discloses handling editors, told us in an email the findings were “especially concerning” given public distrust of science and academic institutions. “Even the mere appearance of conflicts of interest weakens trust in the process.”
If authors think the publication process at a journal is “rigged,” it discourages them from submitting their work to that journal, said Byron, a professor at Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business in Atlanta. The primary responsibility of an editor-in-chief is to publish the highest quality papers, “which is less likely to happen when some (potentially lower-quality) papers are favored and other potentially higher-quality ones are not submitted,” she said.
“It is up to the EIC to set the ethical tone for the editorial team,” Byron said.
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Scientific endeavors advance not only by research and results but also by relationships. In any well-defined field of study, especially for highly focused topics or specialties, the active participants will necessarily form a connected network. Knowing each other and each other’s work does not in itself constitute conflict-of-interest. Such connections are as much a lubricant in the forward movement of science as the network of citations that form the audit trail of ideas and facilitate accumulation of knowledge.
Were we to eliminate all possible instances of even the appearance of conflicts-of-interest, we would be impeding as well the informal exchange and interaction that facilitates progress. Scholars and scientists want and expect their work to be vetted and refereed by those familiar with and best qualified to evaluate the material, and this likely draws on the very network to which authors belong.
It’s a tradeoff. If we prohibit handling by editors or reviewers who know or have ever collaborated with the authors, we may lose something along with any potential gain in credibility. Journals already struggle to find enough reviewers, and many editors are already overworked. If we eliminate anyone in any way and at any time connected with the authors or their work, we risk making the whole publication enterprise more difficult and potentially less effective.
Is there a difference in ‘conflict of interest’ criteria in business journals relative to other journals? It is always hard to eliminate conflicts of interest with editing papers for journals and reviewing grants, but I wonder what the corresponding statistics would look like for other fields e.g., in science, or humanities, relative to business? Having been an editor for many years in neuroscience and having to declare conflicts of interest [which have been clearly defined by the journal], I find it very surprising that the conflict of interest problem could be so abundant in business journals. I also find it surprising that a criticism about the paper would be that “the authors could have more explicitly considered the conflict of interest guidelines journals have”. That immediately made me wonder about any differences that journals in different fields might have with respect to conflict of interest. Are there differences between business journals and other fields with respect to what exactly constitutes a conflict of interest? I thought that would have been pretty clear…
Every attempt i have made to have this study referenced in a published article has resulted in a DEMAND that the material be removed in the next revision. The system is rigged and the riggers have zero intention of allowing that to be publicly confirmed. AoM in particular uses specious claims re “rigor” to enforce the closed circle. This is NOT scholarship it is power games.