MARRI Proceedings Assessment Procedural Standards and Selection Criteria

The goal of this initial stage of the assessment process is two fold: (a) to unequivocally establish the identity, legitimacy and principal officials responsible for the candidate conference proceedings and (b) to establish the scientific quality of the proceedings. Thus, to do this, we assess descriptive and scientific quality using the criteria described below:

STAGE I(a) Descriptive Quality Criteria

Upon receiving a request for evaluation from a candidate conference proceedings publisher, the proceedings will first of all undergo a descriptive quality assessment that entails assessing the identification and establishment details of the proceedings, its policies, its format, and accessibility of its content. Detailed explanation of what these four-item criteria measures is presented below.

Proceedings Identification

Conference Proceedings ISBN and Year of Publication:

Published conference proceedings must demonstrate legitimacy by providing a registered ISBN (print, online or both). The proceedings' ISBN must be verifiable through the web portal of the official ISBN database and must be conspicuously displayed on all of the conference proceedings' portals, platforms and communication materials. The publication year for the conference proceedings to be assessed must also be provided.

Conference Proceedings Title:

Candidate proceedings must have a unique title that is persistently displayed on its content, web presence, platforms and communication outlets. Most importantly, the proceedings' title and its conceptualization must be consistent with the conference from which the proceedings emerged, its registered ISBN, stated management science domain, aims and scope, published content, conference committee domain expertise and author expertise.

Conference Title, Date, Location and Organizer:

In addition to the proceedings title, candidate proceedings must display detailed information about the conference from which it emerged including its organizers and whether the conference was held physically or virtually. The conference must have a unique title that is persistently displayed on its content, web presence, platforms and communication outlets. Most importantly, the conference’s title and its conceptualization must be consistent with those of the proceedings, its stated management science domain, aims and scope, published content, conference committee domain expertise and author expertise.

Conference Proceedings Publisher:

To further fulfill the requirement for legitimacy, the candidate proceedings must unambiguously identify its publisher by name as well as the publisher's official physical address(es). Candidate proceedings emerging from conferences that are affiliated/owned/domiciled in universities, research institutes or disciplinary associations must provide verifiable identification and contact details of the relevant institution.

Conference Proceedings Website/Webpage Address:

Candidate proceedings must present a verifiable and active website/webpage url for both the published conference proceedings and for the parent conference if publications are online. In rare cases where the conference maintains a print-only conference proceedings model, access details must be provided to the MARRII team by the proceedings publisher.

Contact Details of Publisher:

During the assessment process, the MARRII team may occasionally need to maintain direct communication channels with principal officers of the publisher steering editorial and production processes for candidate proceedings. Therefore, the contact details of these principal officers must be provided.

Proceedings Policies

Stated Peer Review Policy:

Candidate proceedings publishers are required to provide evidence of and access to an unambiguous peer review policy demonstrating its commitment to rigorous and transparent external peer review processes for all of its published proceedings papers/content. It must also provide for sufficient editorial scrutiny of other output types such as proceedings introductions, commentaries and opinion pieces.

Stated Ethics Policy:

Candidate proceedings publishers are also required to provide evidence and access to a clear and transparent ethics policy and guidelines for authors as well as for published proceedings/content. Where a publisher adopts well known ethics principles such as COPE or WAME, access to the full document must be provided to authors in a transparent manner either through a downloadable format present on the conference/proceedings' website or via a hyperlink to the full text of the document on the standard organization's website.

Publication Policy (frequency, volume, coverage):

Candidate proceedings publishers must make available a clear indication of the regularity of conference proceedings publications by indicating if the parent conference and its proceedings are held and published annually, bi-annually, etc respectively. However, it should be noted that at MARRII, for coverage purposes, we prioritize proceedings published by conferences held within the current and previous year (with rare exceptions). Candidate proceedings must also unambiguously describe the coverage aims, scope and demonstrate an ability to attract sufficient volume of publications within its stated scope.

Proceedings Format

Scholarly Content:

Candidate proceedings must publish full proceedings papers (using scholarly article format conventions) that primarily contain scholarly content that are original and appropriate to an audience of both management scholars and management practitioners. Paper published in candidate proceedings must have been presented and discussed at the corresponding conference from which it emerged.

Proceedings Paper Titles/Abstracts:

With the exception of introductory or synthesizing editorial sections and other similar communications, all scholarly content published by candidate proceedings must contain a clear title and an abstract section. Both of these must be in the English language. Where proceedings papers are written in a language other than English, English language translations of the title and abstract must be provided.

Persistent Links to Proceedings Papers (DOI):

All published proceedings papers/content must have a link to a persistent and permanent version of the paper. They preferably should be assigned a DOI -details of which must be clearly provided on the webpage of the proceedings paper/content as well as in print versions (where applicable).

Bibliographic Data:

To enable an accurate, quick and smooth indexation process, candidate proceedings must demonstrate that bibliographic information such as author names and affiliations as well as all reference materials cited within a conference proceedings publication are in Roman script.

Author Affiliation/Contact Details:

Information regarding the name(s) of all contributing author(s) as well as the institutions to which they are affiliated must be clearly provided and appropriately displayed on the web, .pdf or print versions of proceedings papers/content where applicable. Contact details of at least a corresponding author must similarly be provided.

Proceedings Editor(s) Affiliation

Sufficient identification, professional and contact details of the principal editor(s) for the candidate proceedings must be provided and clearly stated in all key proceedings level communications. Should the need arise to contact the editor(s), they must be readily available.

Proceedings Scientific Committee Details:

Candidate proceedings must clearly and accurately identify members of the parent conference's scientific committee. Their names, institutional affiliation, domain specialization should be made available in candidate proceedings volume or separately provided.

Access to Proceedings Content

Website Functionality & Information structure:

The parent conference for candidate proceedings must have a fully functioning website displaying accurate information regarding the aim, scope, regularity, ISBN, published content and archiving system applied to its proceedings, as well as those of its principal officers including the organizing committee members, the proceedings editor(s) and scientific committee members, author guidelines, commitment to rigor and relevance, type of access (open/closed) etc. This information must be conspicuously displayed so that visitors can easily find and access them.

Content Access by the MARRII Team:

Candidate proceedings publishers must provide the MARRII team with full access to all of its published content without any viewing restrictions. This may involve the provision of long-term access via a username and password by the candidate journal, or the use of MARRII's IP ranges for access to subscription-only content. For proceedings not published online but physically, publishers must provide alternative and appropriate access.

STAGE I(b) Scientific Quality Criteria

After a candidate proceedings has successfully scaled through the descriptive quality assessment sub-stage 1(a), next, it moves to sub-stage I(b) where it is evaluated for its scientific quality using an 8-item scientific quality assessment criteria. Detailed explanation of what these 8-item criteria measures is presented below.

Content Coherence

Candidate proceedings must demonstrate coherence and consistency with its parent conference as well as its title, stated aims, scope, and statement of purpose.

Adherence to Stated Policies

Candidate proceedings must demonstrate adherence to their stated policy statements. As stated elsewhere, information found on the candidate proceedings parent conference's website must not only be current, but must also be accurate as false marketing or contentious content of any sort will be thoroughly scrutinized during the assessment process.

Adherence to Scientific/Domain Standards

The policy statements of candidate proceedings must conform to widely held scientific standards, best practices and principles as recognized by general scientific standards organizations such as COPE, WAME, as well as domain/discipline-specific scholarly standards stipulated or recognized by national, regional or international scholarly organizations/associations such as the Academy of Management (AOM), Strategic Management Society (SMS), American Marketing Association (AMA) and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) among others, where necessary.

It should be noted that it is not within the scope of the MARRII evaluation process to check compliance with stated policies. However, where allegations of false claims and questionable content is leveled against a candidate conference, its conference proceedings or the proceedings publisher, an investigation viz-a-viz stated policies will be conducted.

Scientific Committee Composition

The scientific committee responsible for the candidate proceedings must be identifiable and must have a proven publication history that largely reflects scholarly expertise in the proceedings’ and its parent conference's core scholarly discipline and scope. The size of the conference and the volume of proceedings papers in the candidate proceedings must be commensurate with the size of the scientific committee. Committee members representing practice, must have had substantial practice-expertise within the proceedings' core domain/discipline.

Expertise of Proceedings Paper/Content Author(s)

Authors of proceedings papers/content must be identifiable and must have a proven scholarly domain and publication history that largely reflects scholarly expertise in the proceedings’ and conference's core scholarly discipline and scope. Co-authors from practice, must have had substantial practice-expertise within the proceedings’ paper's core domain/discipline.

Peer Review Rigor

A candidate proceedings must demonstrate the rigor of its peer-review process as conducted by the proceedings’ editor(s) and scientific/review committee. Its published content must not exhibit any of the myriad manifestations of a poor peer review process, such as proceedings papers/content that are not original and makes no contribution to the literature or management practice, inadequate/inappropriate methodological or theoretical sections, absence of analytical (qualitative, quantitative or mixed) rigor, poor/unethical use of citations and a considerable amount of proceedings paper/content publications outside the scope of the candidate proceedings’ parent conference, among others.

Diversity of Authors

Proceedings papers /contents published in candidate proceedings must be by authors whose professional affiliations, geographic diversity, publication history and primary scholarly/disciplinary community reflects the aims and scope of the proceedings and its parent conference.

Sponsorship Disclosure

The parent conference of the candidate proceedings must conspicuously display all corporate and institutional sponsors at the proceedings level or at conference level (via the conference's website) or both. In addition, the candidate proceedings must require and have a mechanism for disclosing the presence/absence and sources of funding within each published paper/content.

Having successfully passed the assessment of quality in stage I, the candidate proceedings enters stage II of the process, The goal of this second stage of the assessment process is two fold: (a) to establish the candidate proceedings’/publisher’s commitment to, integration of, and prioritization of management-practitioner relevance at the proceedings level, with regard to its operations and processes, and (b) to systematically establish the relevance of the content of its published papers to management practitioner audiences. Thus to do this, we assess relevance in operations and article content relevance using the criteria described below:

STAGE II(a): Relevance in Operations

In sub-stage II(a) the candidate proceeding is assessed for its commitment to, integration of and prioritization of management practitioner relevance with regard to its operations and processes using an 8-item relevance in operations assessment criteria. Detailed explanation of what these 8-item criteria measures is presented below.

Commitment to Relevance

At MARRII, our position is that rigor is crucial in management research, but rigor by itself is not enough. At the minimum, equal prioritization of rigor and relevance must be demonstrated by candidate proceedings publishers. In other words, candidate proceedings containing rigorous management research that is not relevant to practitioners will not be considered for indexation or coverage. Therefore, candidate proceedings publishers must explicitly express their commitment to management research relevance. Either as part of its publication policy or as a stand-alone policy, candidate proceedings must provide a clear and transparent statement regarding their commitment to management research relevance, and must provide relevance-integration guidelines to authors, editorial team members, scientific committee members and reviewers.

Relevance in Conference Proceedings Development

Candidate proceedings must demonstrate that beyond an ‘implications for practice’ section, published proceedings/content explicitly consider relevance to practitioners while determining the management research problem, in designing the research methodology, data collection, and in the discussion and recommendation sections of their research. This can be demonstrated either by academia-practitioner co-authorship of proceedings papers/contents or authorship by academic(s) in clearly documented consultation with related practitioner(s). In both cases, the research problem studied must originate from practice (in the case of timely research) or originate from extant scholarly research (in the case of timeless research). In other words, irrespective of the temporal nature of the research problem (timely or timeless), proceedings papers/content development must have verifiable practitioner input.

Relevance in Peer Reviews

A commitment to relevance also entails that the review process be infused with practitioner insight/input. Therefore, candidate proceedings publishers are required to present a peer review process and criteria that reflects the equal importance accorded to both rigor and relevance.

Relevance in Editorial/Scientific Committee Operations

The candidate proceedings’ editors and scientific committees must comprise both management scholars and practitioners preferably in equal proportion. In other words, expert practitioners from the corresponding management domain must act as co-editors for the candidate proceedings, alongside the main editor who must be an academic. In addition, the parent conference's scientific committee must be composed of both management scholars and management practitioners, preferably in equal proportions. Editorial and scientific committee activities and processes must similarly demonstrate equal consideration for the maximization of relevance just as they traditionally do for rigor.

Relevance in Output Format

Candidate proceedings and their publishers must demonstrate a prioritization of practitioners' interest with regard to the output format of their publications. Traditional conference proceedings paper formats have historically made management research contents intellectually difficult for practitioners to access through jargon-filled, uninspiring and dense proceedings papers/content format designs. Candidate proceedings must demonstrate a commitment to relevance in output format by having a practitioner-friendly proceedings paper format that is jargon-free and easily accessible to practitioners intellectually.

Timeliness of Publication

One of the pillars of relevance is the prompt availability of research to practitioners. In order for management research to be found useful among practitioners, it must be made available on time to be applied to the resolution of the management problem it seeks to address or to be used in managerial decision making in a timely fashion. This is particularly important given the fast-paced change that happens in the real world of management practice. As such, long periods of convergence of traditional management publications is detrimental to the larger need of management practitioners. Therefore, candidate proceedings must demonstrate turnaround times that are reflective of the needs of management practitioners. MARRII prefers turnaround periods that are a third of the average traditional management proceedings publications turnaround period.

Accessibility of Output to Practitioners

While candidate proceedings publishers operating open or closed access models are eligible to be covered in the MARRI-P™, in line with both the ideal future of scientific publication models and management practitioners’ need for easy access to scholarly insights, MARRII recommends the use of access models that allow for easy access, especially those that deploy an open access model.

Reach Within Practice

Candidate proceedings publishers must demonstrate considerable reach and dissemination efforts targeted at management practitioner communities. Evidence of this includes reach within profession-specific associations, profession-specific consulting communities, domain-specific industry associations and representation in practitioner-oriented media outlets.

STAGE II(b): Proceedings Content Relevance

Upon successfully passing the assessment of relevance at the proceedings operations level in sub-stage II(a), the candidate proceedings is assessed for the relevance of the content of its published papers using a 7-item proceedings content relevance assessment criteria. Detailed explanation of what these 7-item criteria measures is presented below.

Descriptive Relevance

Traditional management research has been accused of “armchair theorizing”- a phenomenon in which there is a disconnect between the presentation of management problems derived from scholarly theory and real world manifestations of such problems. Proceedings papers/content published by candidate proceedings must accurately present and describe problems in a manner that is representative of real life management situations; and convincingly demonstrate that research questions are relevant to practice.

Currency Relevance

At MARRII, we recognize two categories of management research under the problem currency relevance category. They are timely and timeless management research. Timely management research are those whose topic/problem are current or trending in practitioner spheres, and for which derived insights are readily implementable/deployable by management practitioners. Timeless management research are those management research whose research questions seek to synthesize extant management research for summary insights of general and non-temporal benefit to practitioners; those which seek to merely stimulate critical thinking among management practitioners and scholars; those which seek to review, initiate or advance management research methodologies or instruments; and those which seek to direct future research. To be considered for MARRI-P coverage, the research problem of all timely research published in candidate proceedings must originate from practice; while the research problem of all timeless research published can originate from management theory/literature, but must be grounded in management practice.

Goal Relevance

To be covered in the MARRI-P, proceedings papers/content published in candidate proceedings must demonstrate that they contain focal topics, main or dependent variable(s) that are verifiably relevant to outcome(s) of interest to practitioners. This is irrespective of whether such proceedings papers/content represent timely or timeless research.

Operational Validity

To be covered in the MARRI-P, proceedings papers/content published in candidate proceedings must demonstrate where applicable, that a proper set of independent/predictor variables was used, and that these variables can be manipulated in real world management and organization settings. This is irrespective of whether such proceedings papers/content represent timely or timeless research.

Non-Obviousness

Proceedings papers/content published in candidate proceedings must present insights, results or information that are not only useful to management practitioners, but transcend common-sense in the sense that to management practitioners, they are non-obvious, novel or both.

Actionable Advice for Practitioners

Beyond traditional ‘implications for practice’ sections, proceedings papers/content published in candidate journals must contain a section that explicitly offers actionable and deployable advice to management practitioners. Preferably, ones that are similar to management consulting advice (where possible).

Proceedings Paper/Content Readability

To be covered in the MARRI-P, articles published in candidate journals must be jargon-free and presented in a language level that is practitioner friendly. Preferably, language levels that conform to grade 8 levels.

Upon evaluation, candidate proceedings that fully and successfully meet both the descriptive and scientific quality criteria in stage I, move to stage II of the assessment process. However, proceedings that fail to fully meet the descriptive quality criteria for the first time,can resubmit for re-assessment without any time or material restrictions. Failure to fully meet the descriptive quality criteria a second time OR failure to meet the scientific quality criteria once, will lead to the rejection of the candidate proceedings without options of re-submission.

If a candidate proceedings scales through quality assessment in stage I it moves to stage II. If after evaluating it for its relevance to management practitioners in stage II, it is found to meet the relevance in operations and paper content relevance sets of criteria, the candidate proceedings will be indexed in MARRII-P. If however, the candidate proceedings are judged to be unsuccessful at this stage (stage II), it will not be indexed and will lose any opportunity for re-submission.

Proceedings indexed in MARRI-P will be removed from the full collection if such proceedings or the relevant publisher are found to have lost quality, relevance or both.