Information for Contributors

This page describes submission requirements, format and style requirements, the submission process, book review submissions, and the editorial process that occurs after a submission is received by Business Ethics Quarterly.

What Business Ethics Quarterly Publishes

Business Ethics Quarterly (BEQ) publishes theoretical, empirical, methodological, and issue-oriented scholarly studies addressing a broad range of topics relevant to the ethics of business, including (but not limited to) the internal ethics of business organizations (such as ethical decision making and behavior in organizations), the role of business organizations in larger social, political and cultural frameworks (such as questions of corporate responsibility and corporate citizenship), and the ethical quality of market-based societies and market-based relationships, in both local and global contexts (such as questions of the social impacts of globalization). BEQ publishes scholarship that is rooted in the humanities, social sciences, and professional fields, and based on either theoretical or empirical research.  Submissions are encouraged from all relevant disciplines, including including accounting, anthropology, economics, finance, history, law, management, marketing, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology, and religious studies/theology.

In recent years BEQ’s acceptance rate for submitted manuscripts has ranged between 8% and 14%. 

Potential authors might find it helpful to review the Tables of Contents of recent issues of the journal to get a sense of the breadth of coverage in the journal, but they should not assume that past practice defines the limits of BEQ's topical coverage. BEQ always is open to new ideas, new issues, and new approaches to questions of ethics in business.

Quantitative and qualitative empirical research (including single or multi-case studies) that makes a contribution to social scientific or philosophical theory is appropriate for BEQ.  But Business Ethics Quarterly does not publish largely descriptive case studies.  BEQ also does not normally publish pedagogically focused research (such as articles on teaching business ethics) unless the pedagogical issue is presented as an opportunity for examining and developing business ethics theory (such as Sumantra Ghoshal's 2004 "Bad management theories are destroying good management practices," Academy of Management Learning and Education 4(1): 75-91, or economist Robert Frank's various studies of the impact of self-interested rational actor models on the behavior and ethics of economics students and faculty). Finally, BEQ normally does not publish empirical research conducted with undergraduate student populations (nor with graduate student populations lacking significant work experience), unless such a population clearly is appropriate because the study is about an aspect of student behavior relevant to business ethics (such as the aforementioned studies by Frank), or because the study is about a basic cognitive, emotional or behavioral processes (e.g., moral imagination, moral identity, moral emotion) which are relevant to business ethics (even if not exclusively relevant to business ethics).  Any submissions using undergraduate student populations (or other samples with limited work experience or constrained age distribution) must make a clear and convincing argument that use of such as sample is appropriate to the study’s purpose.

Submission Requirements

Business Ethics Quarterly publishes only new scholarship.  Authors must affirm that their submissions have not been published elsewhere, either in whole or in part, in any language.  (Prior presentation of a work at a conference is acceptable.  Prior publication in conference proceedings might be acceptable, depending on the format and distribution of the proceedings.  Please discuss prior publication in conference proceedings with the editor.)  Any brief citations of prior work by the author must be properly documented.  (Lengthy citations to an author's prior work will raise questions of the extent to which the work submitted to BEQ is a new contribution to scholarship.)  If necessary to preserve anonymity in the review process, authors' names may be replaced with placeholders (e.g., replace "Smith, 2003" with "Author, 2003") and removed from the list of references.  However, the author should, in such cases, provide the editor with an additional document listing these anonymized sources. 

All use of published or unpublished work by persons other than the author must receive proper citation.

In the case of manuscripts based on empirical data, whether qualitative or quantitative, the author must inform the editor of any other prior and pending publications also based on all or part of the data under study. 

Authors must certify that the submitted work is not under review by another publication, and that it will not be submitted for review elsewhere while under review at BEQ.  Works previously submitted to BEQ and rejected are not acceptable unless the prior rejection letter specifically indicated that BEQ would consider another future manuscript on the topic from the author.

In order to avoid compromising the anonymous review process, it is advisable for authors to refrain from presenting their work at conferences while it is under review at BEQ, and to remove any online postings of the manuscript.

Formatting and Style Requirements

Manuscripts be double-spaced, using 12-point Times New Roman (or similar) type, and should not exceed 12,000 words.

The manuscript itself should be prepared without a title page.  Authors should also prepare a separate title page listing full contact information for all authors.  The manuscript body and title page will be submitted as two separate documents.  The first page of the manuscript should include the title and an abstract; abstracts must not exceed 150 words.

All tables and charts must be placed at the end of the manuscript, and submitted as part of the manuscript and not as separate documents.

Non-empirical manuscripts must conform to one (and only one) of either the Chicago Manual of Style, the Academy of Management Review Style Guide for Authors (http://aom.pace.edu/AMR/style.html), or The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.

Tables of data, listings of hypotheses, and mathematical or other formulae in empirical manuscripts should follow the Academy of Management Journal Style Guide for Authors (http://aom.pace.edu/amjnew/style_guide.html) with regard to such features.

Either British or American spelling is acceptable.

BEQ encourages authors to use non-sexist language.

Authors who use the tracking or comment functions of commercially available word processing programs should be sure to remove any lingering comments or tracked revisions.

Submission Process

Manuscripts fitting the format and style requirements above should be submitted electronically at http://editorialexpress.com/beq.  Authors who do not have Internet access should contact the managing editor regarding alternative submission formats:  Dr. Elizabeth D. Scott, Managing Editor Business Ethics Quarterly, Department of Business Administration, Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic CT 06226 USA; Tel. +1.860.465.5366.

After submitting a manuscript, authors will receive a confirmation of submission.  If that does not arrive, please contact the managing editor.

Authors submitting a revised manuscript also should include itemized responses to the editor's and reviewers' comments on the previous version of the manuscript.  These responses should be fully anonymous.  To preserve your anonymity, you should provide this response by copying and pasting into the space provided during the submission process.

Book Reviews

Persons who would like to suggest a book for review, or who are interested in reviewing a book, should contact associate editor Al Gini, School of Business, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL  60611 USA; Tel. +1.312.915.6093; email agini@luc.edu.

Editorial Process

Adapted from the Winter 2007 Society for Business Ethics Newsletter; written by Editor Gary Weaver.

When a submission arrives, the editor (or, occasionally, an associate editor) makes an initial decision as to whether the manuscript is a reasonable candidate for full review by between two and four anonymous reviewers (usually it’s three reviewers).  Manuscripts that fail this initial screening usually do so on grounds that they either (a) are not on a topic appropriate for BEQ, (b) essentially repeat what already has been said on a topic, without contributing much new insight, (c) are more journalistic or “op-ed” than scholarly in level of argument and detail, (d) if empirical, make largely descriptive, rather than explanatory, use of the data, or (e) are not written with adequate clarity. 

Having passed that initial screening, an anonymous copy of manuscript is sent out for review.  We try to have at least one member of the editorial board among the reviewers.  In addition, we try for appropriate disciplinary coverage among reviewers; for example, a philosophy-oriented manuscript goes to mostly philosophically-trained reviewers.  The mostly is important.  We sometimes send manuscripts to a reviewer from an “outside” field, for assistance in determining whether the author has framed the ideas in a way that connects adequately with scholars from outside the author’s specialty.  Once the reviews are in, either I or one of the associate editors read the reviews, read the manuscript, read whatever else we need to (because sometimes we need to read further on a topic in order to make an informed decision), and write the decision letter. Decisions normally are either reject, revise and resubmit, conditionally accept, or accept (with the latter two almost never occurring on an initial submission; it is normal to receive a request for revision, and if authors receive a request for revision, it means they have made it past the toughest hurdle). A majority of decision letters are written by the editor, with associate editors dividing the remainder according to topical appropriateness. 

Authors receive the decision letter along with anonymous copies of the reviewers’ comments (and the reviewers receive each others’ comments).  Authors do not receive a separate evaluation statement that reviewers submit to the deciding editor.  Reviewers sometimes provide additional comments to the decision editor (e.g., “I’ve made many comments, but my first two comments are the most important with respect to whether the manuscript should be accepted,” or “The misunderstandings and errors in the manuscript do not give me confidence in the author’s ability to revise it successfully.”)  Authors always should read the reviewers’ comments in light of the decision editor’s letter.  Reviewers do not always agree, and the editor’s letter often will give advice as to which issues, of those raised by reviewers, are most important to deal with.  Also, the editors do not simply tally the reviews, pro and con, to make a decision.  The editors also are evaluating the quality of reviews as they read them, and may discount a review if it appears that the reviewer in some way has not done a careful and balanced job.

Authors invited to submit a revision also should send along a separate document in which they explain how they have dealt with the various issues raised by the decision editor and reviewers (for example, if a reviewer says that you should have considered the implications of work by Max Weber for your own thesis, tell the reviewer that you’ve incorporated a discussion of this work in relation to your own on, say, page 23 of the revised manuscript).  Please note:  authors are free, in this response, to argue that the editor or reviewers are wrong, misunderstood the manuscript, etc., and so consequently no changes have been made in the manuscript.  (Whether editors and reviewers will agree, of course, is an open question.)

In the case of a revised manuscript, the original decision editor reads the revision (and the author’s reply to reviewers), and makes a new decision as to whether the issues and concerns prompted by the first version of the manuscript have been dealt with adequately.  In some cases it’s obvious.  But in most cases, the manuscript is sent back out to the original reviewers to get their opinion on the revision, and the process is repeated.  It is important for authors to do revisions carefully, as we try to make a fairly final decision on most manuscripts during the second round of review.  That is, once we receive a revision, the most likely decision on it will be either rejection or conditional acceptance (that is, accepted provided certain minor problems are fixed—e.g., “clarify the first paragraph on page 13,” “add a brief discussion of the implications of your conclusion for thinking about topic X,” etc.). 

Once a manuscript is finally accepted, publication scheduling is decided by the editors, and production is handled by the Philosophy Documentation Center.