Following my announcement of the new JOB Mission in Issue 1 of this volume (Ashkanasy, 2008), it would seem to be worthwhile to review some of the policies adopted by the JOB editorial team when they assess submissions. Since the current editorial team has been in office, JOB has received a record total of 402 submissions, comprising 372 research papers, 21 special issue submissions, 6 incubator papers, and 3 invited essays. Of these submissions, 286 have been decided upon at the time of writing, resulting in 132 rejects (including 80 desk-rejections), 67 invitations to submit a revision, and 8 acceptances. The rest are in various stages of consideration. In the end, JOB publishes around 50 papers per year (including invited and point-counterpoint essays, special issues, incubators), indicating an acceptance ratio for competitive submissions of around 10%. So the question is: What constitutes a successful submission?
First and foremost, submissions need to address the JOB Mission. In this respect, the JOB Mission is broad, encompassing ''research and theory in all topics associated with organizational behavior within and across individual, group, and organizational levels of analysis.'' So long as the topic addresses an aspect of organizational behavior, it is welcome. Moreover, we at JOB take pride in its international inclusiveness, and therefore we aim to ''publish empirical reports and theoretical reviews of research in the field of organizational behavior, wherever in the world that work is conducted'' (Ashkanasy, 2008, p. 1).
Second, submissions need to be well composed and presented. Authors should realize that, at this level of competitiveness, submission of manuscripts marred by problems of readability and logical cohesiveness negatively impacts on the chances of a positive outcome. This applies especially to authors whose native language is not English. My advice to authors in this category who do not have a high-level command of English writing is either to enlist a co-author who does, or to engage a native English-speaking copyeditor. Indeed, many highly respected English-speaking authors still find it useful to employ the services of a good copyeditor to ensure the English expression in their submission is impeccable.
JOB accepts both theory/review and empirical submissions, and there is no restriction on empirical approaches (Greenberg, 2007); JOB accepts both qualitative and quantitative research. At the same time, the large majority of the papers published to date in JOB have been in the positivist quantitative tradition. Since 2003, only 20 papers that incorporate at least a component of qualitative data analysis have been published, including a small minority based entirely on qualitative data. For example, Dick (2006) analyzed the results of interviews with UK police officers who related their experiences of