To get things started here at our new blog, we want to take a moment and highlight a recent Editorial article in which we discussed twelve key tips that will help you get your article published in Business & Society. Submissions to quality journals, including ours, continues to climb. In 2015 we received a record number of submissions (over 500) and trends indicate this was not an aberration. While many of the articles are outstanding and are shaping the many ongoing conversations related to business and society, nearly 70% of the articles we received are desk rejected.

As authors ourselves, we understand the amount of time and energy invested into manuscripts and empathize with the frustration of receiving rejection letters. Likewise, it is unpleasant to write rejection letters; we would much rather extend requests to revise manuscripts or, better yet, write acceptance letters. However, many of the articles we receive simply do not pass the first hurdle in terms of fit and quality of work to be considered for further revision.

For those reasons, we reviewed previous Editorials in Business & Society regarding publishing in our journal, complied the top twelve reasons, and published them here. We encourage you to read the full article and, in the meantime, please review the summary, below. You may even want to post a physical or virtual copy of them nearby to ensure your next submission to Business & Society will have a great chance of positive feedback.

The Twelve Tips for Getting Published in Business & Society:

1. Ensure your manuscript fits the Business & Society domain.
2. Meet our quality threshold.
3. Avoid submitting too early.
4. Join a business and society conversation.
5. Make a theoretical contribution.
6. Make your phenomenon theoretically distinctive.
7. Make your geographic context theoretically distinctive.
8. Ensure your research design aligns with your research questions.
9. Deliver qualitative analysis that goes beyond first-order description.
10. Explain and justify your methodological decisions and protocols.
11. Avoid “incompetence cues.”
12. Engage constructively with your editor and reviewers.