CROSSROADS—Applied Science Deserves a Bigger Role in Business Research

I am a career-long services marketing and service quality researcher. In 2001, I took a sabbatical to address a “gap” in my work by studying healthcare service at Mayo Clinic, where I learned about healthcare’s uniqueness as a service, its complex challenges, and its potential for healing when delivered well. Although energized to contribute to the medical literature when I returned from Mayo, I was not equipped to write influential medical articles. So, I steeped myself in the medical literature, enlisted expert physicians as coauthors, and published my first medical article in the top-tier Annals of Internal Medicine (Berry et al. 2003). Since then, I have conducted extensive field research at other major health systems, most recently at Henry Ford Health in Detroit in 2022, and have published my health services work in both business and medical journals. Especially meaningful is my ongoing research on improving the care experiences of cancer patients and their families (Berry et al. 2017a, b; Jacobson et al. 2020).

The past two decades collaborating with physician coauthors who contribute clinical expertise to the work and add medical heft to the byline have revealed lessons in applied science that are relevant to academic business journals and the scholars who publish in them. Three key lessons stand out:

• Borrow selectively from medical publishing’s best practices.

• Innovate in novel ways that uniquely suit business disciplines and applied science.

• Encourage researchers to influence real-world practice.

This essay focuses on how academic business journals can realistically implement these lessons.

Borrow Selectively from Medical Publishing’s Best Practices

Writing for both business and medical journals has illuminated for me their stark differences. To start, medical journals emphasize evidence over theory. That is because making changes to clinical healthcare demands hard data. You do not tinker with people’s health based on theory, without concrete evidence to back it up. The writing in medical journals reflects that. Authors of articles amply cite prior empirical research studies, and they weave the cited literature into the presentation of their own, new, data-driven findings. Medical articles are also shorter and get to the main story quickly. If you want a medical paper to get published and to be influential, there is no time (or space) for discursive prose and pontificating. Successful investigators who conduct and publish high-quality medical research (not all the quality is high) describe what they did and why, share rigorous data, and discuss precisely how it will make a difference.

The top medical journals have global audiences that can exceed a million readers. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), for example, had an impact factor of 96.2 in 2023. These journals are read because their content can change how clinicians practice medicine and the quality-of-care that patients receive. The potential for application to the daily delivery of healthcare is often clear, even if not always immediate. In short, applied science is built into the very purpose of medical publishing.

Many medical journals devote far more space than academic business journals to brief opinion essays. For example, it is common for NEJM to publish three or four “Perspective” opinion essays per issue alongside a half dozen or more empirical clinical studies and one or more in-depth, special topic “review” papers. Medical journal opinion pieces usually range from 1,000 to 1,500 words, with citations limited to 10 or fewer. These rigorously refereed essays typically present one primary, well-argued, original idea tailored to some segment of the readership. They give authors an opportunity to be creative, bold, and provocative—unlike in “opinion-free” scientific research articles. Such expert-authored essays with a point of view are among the most frequently read content in the top medical journals, given their brevity, topical relevance, and timeliness. They often spark ideas for new empirical research.

Academic business journals would likely bolster their readership of published content (inside and outside their respective disciplines) by formally committing to publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed essays on pertinent and timely topics meant to stimulate discussion, debate, and future research. Moreover, the opinion essay format encourages a focus on practical solutions, consistent with the goal of encouraging capable business scholars to devote more attention to applied science. It might be reasonable for a business journal to dedicate 10%–15% of its content to these types of opinion pieces.

One of my most personally rewarding writing projects was a 1,000-word piece in Annals of Internal Medicine’s “Ideas and Opinions” section. My physician coauthor and I made the “business case” for health systems to be more generous to their workers during the days of the COVID-19 pandemic. With rising costs and lower revenues, many hospitals were making short-term decisions to furlough or let go employees and cut others’ hours, ignoring “…the hidden cost of an ungenerous culture—lower morale, less discretionary effort, diminished trust in the organization, and less teamwork…” (Berry and Awdish 2021, p. 104). Among other data, we presented the estimated cost of $500,000 to replace just one physician who leaves (Shanafelt et al. 2017, Willard-Grace et al. 2019), describing how a health system with many doctors could realize net savings of millions of dollars just by reducing physician turnover. The saved money could then be invested directly in the workforce.

Another exemplary practice of medical journals is a timeline of months, not years, from initial article submission to publication, although some researchers in medicine still think publication lags are too long. After sending papers out for peer review, medical journal editors typically decide whether to accept a paper after one revision, two at the most. Depending on a revision’s complexity, authors are given tight deadlines (in some cases, for example, just one month) to turn around a revision. Certainly, revision is an intensive process, particularly when new data must be collected and when statistical analyses must be run (and rerun) multiple times to address reviewers’ comments. Nonetheless, compared with academic business journals, everything is faster in medical publishing, in part because of its practical importance.

Timeliness is not a strength of academic business journals. Two- to three-year lags (or more) from initial manuscript submission to online publication before print are common. To be sure, it takes time to conduct research on complex organizational and managerial problems (often, the most important problems managers face). However, adding a lengthy review process on top of time-consuming research can discourage researchers from investigating the issues that matter most to managers—and, in turn, offer managers little reason to search academic journals for guidance on solutions to their pressing problems. For research to be relevant, it must be timely. Academic business journals should consider a policy of limiting revisions to two rounds (with rare exceptions) before either rejecting or conditionally accepting a manuscript. Deadlines for resubmitting revisions should be adapted to the amount of work required. Editorial reviewers who are chronically late in submitting their reviews or editors who are chronically slow in issuing a decision once the reviews are in should be advised and, if necessary, dropped. Academic business journal publishing is too slow in a fast-paced world; we can do better.

Innovate Applied Science Publishing in Novel Ways

Academic business journals should consider adding a new category of articles that require academic–practitioner coauthorship. Such pieces would, like other articles, undergo rigorous review, but with category-specific criteria that include academic–practitioner collaboration, with a focus on a real-world problem or opportunity. Gathering data, developing insights, and building relationships with prospective collaborators for such articles often necessitate that academic researchers embed themselves in the focal organization for a period of time.

Also, a small number of carefully chosen businesspeople could serve on an industry advisory board to a business journal and occasionally assist in refereeing articles with an orientation toward application to real-world practice. Naturally, those businesspeople whose work roles align with a specific journal’s subject-matter focus and who have an interest in academic collaboration would merit first consideration. Academics who actively interact with the business community are likely to know executives who would be valuable advisory board members. Journal editors with an eye toward recruiting businesspeople can appeal to those individuals’ sense of greater purpose and pride as leaders who actively shape an industry with their acumen and expertise.

Selected journals in each of the major business disciplines could also consider sponsoring annual conferences or symposia, attended by academics, in which industry speakers would make presentations on the biggest problems they are facing and the research that would help them most. Journals could seek corporate or trade association partnerships to help defray the costs of hosting such events. Business magazines, such as Fortune and Bloomberg Business Week, sponsor conferences for executives. Corporations or trade groups could also cosponsor academic journal conferences for professors (of course without compromising editorial independence).

Encourage Business Researchers to Influence Real-World Practice

The type of reorientation I experienced when I turned my career to helping improve healthcare service is available to any business researcher who embraces a practical stance toward applied science—and is willing to collaborate with experts in the focal industry or profession who can help them get the substance right. But researchers should not have to make this discovery entirely on their own. By reforming how they acquire, publish, and explicitly promote applied science research, business journals can facilitate that discovery.

Journals can articulate this publishing mission openly, with a letter to readers expressing a mission-driven rationale for the new approach, which does not compromise rigor but in fact enhances it. Such an editorial from the journal’s editors would also model the tone of the expert-opinion pieces that the journal wants to solicit from that point forward. In addition, it would specifically announce how the reforms would affect publication processes and policies. Follow-up communications from the journal could publicly showcase the successes of articles that are especially influential, encouraging correspondence from readers not just about the published studies themselves but also about their practical value in applied settings. In short, the publication enterprise would become a dynamic and ongoing dialogue among editors, researchers, and practitioners.

A New Era for Applied Science Publishing

Kudos to Organization Science for publishing this series of essays exploring ways to better support applied science in academic business research. Applied science is consistent with American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business International’s new business school accreditation standard on research that distinguishes between “output” (e.g., number of publications) and “outcomes” (the impact of the publications). Business schools have major talent with the ability to help organizations and society tackle the biggest problems. As academic researchers, many of us can be personally and professionally rejuvenated by the rewarding endeavor of working on solutions that truly effect change. So much effort is expended to publish in a top journal. Given that reality, let us seek to make a more practical difference with the content of our work by taking concrete steps in encouraging its direct application to improved business practices. Imagine if executives viewed academic business journals as just as vital to their daily work as how clinicians view medical journals. Imagine if we in academia all made this commitment: “My research should aim to improve people’s lives.”