Reflections on the last four years of RAUSP’s Management Journal

Citation

Hourneaux Junior, F. (2020), "Reflections on the last four years of RAUSP’s Management Journal", RAUSP Management Journal, Vol. 55 No. 1, pp. 2-3. https://doi.org/10.1108/RAUSP-02-2020-149

As the reader certainly has noticed, our journal has been through several changes in the past four years. All these changes began with a new policy, from both the University of Sao Paulo and the Department of Business Administration of our school, intended to foster the internationalisation of our initiatives in 2015. The steps we have taken for making this journal more international will be described in this editorial.

As one of the first effects of this new international perspective, the traditional RAUSP – Revista de Administração da USP was replaced by RAUSP Management Journal. This decision ratified the previous policy, created in 2016, since when our journal has been publishing articles only in English language. This internationalisation process at RAUSP has already been addressed by a previous editorial (Saes & Hourneaux , 2019).

The consolidation of the publishing industry within a few big international players is a well-known phenomenon (Rønning & Slaatta, 2011). This was the rationale we considered to increase the internationalisation of the journal even more by adopting an international publisher as an outlet for our articles. At first, this publisher was Elsevier B.V., from September 2016 to July 2018. After that, it was replaced by Emerald Publishing Limited, our current partner. We must say that there were several difficulties to change the systems and procedures from one provider to the other (and also from our previous home-made system). Fortunately, all these issues have been solved.

Nevertheless, we can cite some lessons learned through this period. First, as we have mentioned, is the adaptation to the publishers’ procedures and standards and the difficulties in adapting these to the Brazilian context. These changes required time and flexibility from all our partners to be accomplished.

Second is the need for change from Portuguese to English, from that point on, as the official language of the journal. As literature shows, the predominance of the English language in scientific publications can be a barrier for researchers from non-English-speaking countries (Flowerdew, 1999; Ge, 2015). As we have mentioned, as all the articles must be published in the English language, we have constantly recommended the authors to enhance the quality of their writing, sometimes taking more time and adding new rounds for the final approval of the article.

Despite these difficulties, some innovative initiatives were implemented. From 2017 on, every issue has had an invited paper, called “ThinkBox”. For writing these articles, distinguished scholars from Brazil and abroad are asked to send their contributions to cutting-edge themes on several aspects of management. “ThinkBox” articles are among the most read in our collection, we must add.

Another new feature is the videos recorded by the article’s authors. Some authors have been invited to disclose their research through these short videos that are available at Retrieved from www.rausp.usp.br. This initiative, along with efforts in social media, has increased the exposure of the research published in RAUSP Management Journal.

Finally, we must thank our group of Associate Editors in the different themes covered by our journal. This initiative of creating this new category of facilitators allowed us to have higher qualified reviewers and a more careful reviewing process, coordinated by these dedicated associate editors.

In short, it has been a four-year period, not only of changes but also of good results. RAUSP Management Journal has, undoubtedly, raised its level of quality and transparency and has received the acknowledgement of the scientific community worldwide. In these past few years, RAUSP Management Journal has been included in both Scopus (Elsevier) and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI – Clarivate Analytics) databases, and we also keep on trying to be approved to have a JCR impact factor. Now we should wait for what comes in the next years.

NOTE:

This is the first issue published since our dear colleague, Professor Maria Sylvia Macchione Saes, left this editorship. We must send her our most sincere appreciation for her leadership in the process described above.

She wrote the message below, and we are reproducing it here:

The time I served as RAUSP Management Journal’s editor-in-chief was a period of learning and especially joy. We were able to share and discuss all the changes we passed through with a group of cooperative, creative and competent specialists, to which I mainly include our Associate Editors and also the professionals of our publishers Elsevier and Emerald. I am also grateful to my predecessor Nicolau Reinhard who showed me the ways of being an editor. I appreciate the support of FEA-USP’s Business Administration Department, in particular, our colleagues Roberto Sbragia, Moacir Miranda and Adriana Marotti de Mello. And also Celeste Lima and Flávio Hourneaux, the current co-editor and the next editor-in-chief, who more than being professional, became a great friend and, I am sure, who will do much more for RAUSP Management Journal.