Interview with Barrie Nault

Conducted by Raymond Patterson

Barrie Nault is the David B. Robson Professor in Management (MIS), and Director of the Informatics Research Centre (iRC) at the University of Calgary. He served as the IS Department Editor for Management Science (along with Ramayya Krishnan) from 2004-2007. We first interviewed Barrie before he took up his post as DE, and decided to interview him again to see how his views may have been altered by this experience. We thank Ray for arranging this interview, and appreciate Barrie’s willingness to accommodate us at very short notice.

RAY: Tell us about your experience as IS Department Editor for Management Science.

BARRIE: The MS DE role was a great experience but also a tremendous amount of work. The feedback about the turnaround in the IS Department that Krishnan and I were able to be part of has been incredibly positive, and I think all the authors and colleagues that took the time to give us feedback should be recognized. And, of course, the IS Department at MS would not be seen as positively as it is today without the tremendous efforts, responsiveness, and fairness of a vast majority of our academic community in their roles as AEs and reviewers.

There are several issues that my experience seeing over 200 submissions at MS showed me. First, we are a discipline in many senses of that word - cumulative tradition, relatively well-defined body of research, well-defined academic community, recognition of ourselves as a distinct academic community, and a taste for quality research that matches that of other disciplines in MS.

Next, publishing in MS is tough, and it’s tough because of the standards of our discipline. Rarely if ever did I find I had reason to overrule the remainder of the review team and turn down a submission. More common was the AE and myself giving authors a chance at a revision when reviewers were less positive. Thus, the standards in place in the IS Department at MS reflect our academic community.

Our struggles at the moment come from an increase in submissions to the IS Department at MS (and evidently at our other top journals) that outpaces the increase in the number of colleagues in our discipline able to participate in the review process. Our acceptance rate appears to be relatively low compared with some departments, and it has been almost impossible to render a decision after the first resubmission - something MS endeavours to do. To me this means that our papers need to be more polished before submission, and that is consistent with my subjective opinion based on experience.

I am very optimistic about the future of our discipline based on the extensive amount of talent I saw reflected in submissions. I was also happy to accept very good papers from diverse areas of our discipline, and the standards applied across these diverse areas by members of the review teams was fairly uniform. I would also like to think that during my time as DE we kept obvious conflicts of interest at bay. As Krishnan and I were the first DE twosome, we established an agreement whereby our papers could not be submitted to each other. I was careful to assign AEs who were arm's length from the papers they were asked to handle, and who were not hostile to the authors/schools/methodologies in the papers. Perhaps most importantly, I have lots of experience having my own papers rejected at top journals - experience which to my dismay continues to accumulate. So I tried to make it a point to sympathize with authors who made significant efforts in their research, yet found their work rejected by me at MS.

Of course, the editorial work for me is not over. At MS the DEs remain as DE on papers initially submitted to them, so I have over 30 papers (I believe) in various stages of review/revision. I applaud Krishnan for continuing as a DE, and to Sandy for stepping in as the new DE.

RAY: You mentioned that papers need to be more polished prior to first submission than in the past. What recommendations do you have for young faculty members and Ph.D. students to obtain this polish, which often comes from maturity as a writer?

BARRIE: I did an informal (read: convenience) sample over the last few years about how many authors received written feedback on papers they presented at university seminar series. The result was virtually none. So I have this sense that most manuscripts submitted to me at MS had never been carefully and critically read by anyone outside of the authors.

One idea I have shared with others is to find 2-3 colleagues and create a team that is willing to read each other’s papers and give critical feedback as though it was in the review process. Two or even one paper per year for each team member would be sufficient. So long as they are arm’s length from the paper, team members could be suggested reviewers when submitting the paper – rarely is more than one suggested reviewer selected and the mode is none. Oddly enough, polish was not highly correlated with seniority in the submissions I saw, so all of us could benefit from this.

RAY: Is there a short list of “paper killing” features? Or turning this around, what is the short-list of “successful paper” features?

BARRIE: It took me several years as an author to figure out that I needed to write papers for my audience rather than myself. This means a paper should be as easy to read by others as possible given the science contained in it. Part of this means figuring out what the really important results are, and communicating what they are, why they are important, and how your methods show that the results are unambiguously true.

Poorly written papers, and papers that are painful to read, start off handicapped. In addition, MS is a top interdisciplinary journal, so the methods need to be rigorous. I find methods relatively easy to explain in a paper (as compared to other parts of a paper like the introduction/motivation), and review teams have little patience with convoluted explanations of methods.

In a book about writing science I came across the IMRAD model, which is one I like: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. With this model the literature is embedded as part of the introduction, which is good because the literature should be part of what motivates the research.

RAY: Is there an impact of the authors’ social network on their ability to get research published in top journals?

BARRIE: Sure there is, but for two different reasons – one bad and one good. The bad one is when colleagues in a social network accept each other’s papers. Happily, this can be controlled by a properly assigned review team, and that is one of the things I mentioned above in keeping conflicts of interest at bay.

The other is a good reason – colleagues in a social network are able to call on each other for expertise, ideas and direction. So long as the social network is encouraging to its members, it can be a great motivator to get good research done. The friendships in such a network are part of what makes our research work exciting because success can be shared. This aspect can sometimes be lost on junior colleagues that feel the success of others compromises the fruits of their own success – only in rare cases is this actually the case.

RAY: Is there a recommended strategy young faculty for pushing a paper through at a top journal?

BARRIE: First, make sure someone else with good training reads it and gives feedback before submission. Of course, implement some of the feedback – including feedback that it might not be good enough for a top journal. Next, make suggestions for reviewers, and let the editor know who you feel should not review it. After 3-4 months, if you don’t hear back, feel comfortable sending a polite note to the editor asking about the status of your paper. I never felt hassled by notes like that – sometimes these notes would highlight an issue that I needed to follow up more rigorously.

After you get reviews, and you have an opportunity to revise and resubmit, listen carefully to what the reviews tell you. The science part is obvious, but also listen to what they say about how the paper is written, and what the real contribution is. This is the review team you have to deal with, and nobody knows everything, so recognize that when a review team member does not seem to understand what you are doing, it’s likely your deficiency in communication.

RAY: Are there such things as good topics and bad topics for top journal publications? If so, what are the characteristics of good and bad topics?

BARRIE: This is hard to answer because we all think what we are doing is important and a good topic for top journal publication – otherwise we wouldn’t be spending time on it. One important feature of a good top journal topic is that it is linked to important big problems in the literature like coordination, productivity, etc. The linkage and implications should be made clear in the paper as well.