Welcome to the first issue in JOB's third decade of publishing high quality research in the field of organizational behavior. As Senior Editor Coyle-Shapiro and I stated in our respective editorials introducing the first and last issues of Volume 30 (Coyle-Shapiro, 2009;Ashkanasy, 2009a), JOB has a proud record, and is seeking to build upon its reputation in its next decade.
As I write this editorial, JOB is processing the 542nd submission since 1 January 2009. By the end of 2009, JOB will have received in excess of 600 submissions. This is double the number of submissions received in 2007, the first year of my term as Editor-in-Chief. Moreover, the same is happening at other journals in management and applied psychology. Part of the reason for this upsurge is attributable to the increased number of submissions from Europe and Asia. In addition, the quality of submissions is also rapidly improving. As Editor-in-Chief, I desk-edit all regular issue submissions; and I can report that only a tiny fraction of the submissions are easy to desk-reject, based on obvious low quality. This is in contrast to 2007, when I would regularly receive submissions from authors who clearly did not know how to prepare manuscripts for publication at this level.
What does this mean for authors? In the first instance, it seems publishing is more difficult than ever. Authors now have to contend with a greater level of competition from around the world. JOB publishes only 50 or so articles and reviews per year, so this means the acceptance rate is now around 8 per cent. Submissions that once would have stood a good chance of acceptance risk desk-rejection today. For example, while I expressed some tolerance of research based on single administration self-report survey instruments in an earlier editorial (Ashkanasy, 2008), I find now that reviewers routinely reject articles based on this method, even when authors attempt to control for common method using statistical means. And it does not seem to help authors to cite literature that argues the problem is not necessarily so bad (e. g., Doty & Glick, 1998;Spector, 2006). It seems reviewers consider multi-source (or at least multi-administration) data collection methods to be a pre-requisite for publication at this level.
Another effect of such low acceptance rates is that the Type II error rate (i.e., rejection of high quality submissions) rises dramatically. This is a well-known problem in the social science literature, and was demonstrated empirically by Peters and Ceci (1982). These authors submitted 12 already published psychology articles to the same journals they were published in and found that only one was accepted