Core Publications in Entrepreneurship and Related Fields

A Guide To Getting Published

Version 9 (now matches list v.9, version jumped from 5.9a)

October 15, 2018

Jerome A. Katz, Saint Louis University

Introduction

This is part of eWeb's efforts to document entrepreneurship education's infrastructure. The list has been steadily growing over the past several years, and the indexing industry has also grown. In 2003 there were four entrepreneurship journals listed in SSCI. Today there are seventeen (alphabetically ERD, ERJ, ETP, FBR, IEMJ, ISBJ, JBV, Journal of Creative Behavior, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Journal of Family Business Strategy, JSBM, Journal of Technology Transfer, Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, SBE, SEJ, Technovation) if we include technology transfer, as well as the twelve mainstream management journals (AOM Annals, AMJ, AMLE, AMP, AMR, ASQ, Agricultural Economics, Business History, JME, JMS, MSci, SMJ) which publish entrepreneurship articles along with those from other disciplines. The list still has the same basic model - it is a list of English-language periodicals related to entrepreneurship (including small business, SMEs, microenterprise, new firms, family business, and related fields).

The list continues to be a combination of fact and opinion - facts regarding specific periodicals out there, but opinion as to which journals are truly central to entrepreneurship. Note that opinion shows where I have included journals as "core" to entrepreneurship in a few cases where they are not exclusively entrepreneurial in focus. Examples include the e-commerce journals and the Journal of Technology Transfer. Please feel free to reframe the list based on your own opinions about centrality and boundary, and also feel free to let me know of omissions or errors at jerome.katz@slu.edu

What I do leave out are rankings, and I refer those interested to the outstanding work done by Anne-Wil Harzing in creating her Journal Quality Lists which include entrepreneurship as a disciplinary area. Another wonderful option she offers is the free program Publish or Perish which will let anyone generate a wealth of impact statistics on any journal (or author) of their choice. You might ask why I didn't include those statistics here. The answer is simple - they'd be immediately out of date so if you quoted them in your tenure packet, and a committee member downloaded PorP and ran the stats for themselves, you would be proven wrong (well, out of date, but the same thing in this situation). When you need the stats, run them yourself and carefully document the date and base numbers (typically the number of articles published) so you cover yourself.

The fact that SSCI and the other major indexing services include significant numbers of journals shows the growth in acceptance of entrepreneurship as a field of study. The fact that entrepreneurship journals get into "top tier" lists such as those of Financial Times further supports the idea.

Included are hotlinks to the home page of the journal, or to web-accessible descriptions with electronic mail links to the editors, or to web-based descriptions of the journal by its sponsoring organization or commercial publisher. The goal here is to make easier the process of finding and contacting editors.

If You're Thinking of Publishing Read This: Implications and Predictions

There are three interesting aspects to the list below:

There are a lot of entrepreneurship journals. With over 170 academic ones more or less totally dedicated to the field, with another dozen where entrepreneurship related papers or special issues regularly show-up. It may be possible that every article written in entrepreneurship could get published. Why? Because while the number of academic journals grew by 50% in ten years, the number of faculty teaching has not kept pace.
The vast majority of journals are now published by commercial operations and these continue to grow. This has resulted in a burgeoning of outlets, and encouragement to create new ones from publishers eager to cash-in on what seems to be a fast-growing field. If you want to start a journal it is easier than ever. With the growing popularity and grudging acceptance of strictly online journals, and the availability of solid open source journal management software such as Open Journal Systems available for free, it is easier to start a journal now than ever before. And note (as one entrepreneur to another) that having an established journal makes it a more valuable property when negotiating with publishers who want to add your journal to their stable.
The real growth continues to occur overseas, where new journals and especially commercial publisher interest in entrepreneurship journals, is growing at an unprecedented rate. The challenge for these non-USA English-language journals is to break into the American market, with the vast majority of academic entrepreneurship centers, degree programs and faculty in entrepreneurship.
There has been considerable innovation and growth in the indexing industry. Part of this has been the natural growth of index services, with the most notable example being SSCI's Emerging Citation Index, which added 34 entrepreneurship related journals to Clarivate's coverage. Another source of growth has been the explosion of open-access journals and open-access papers in commercial journals. These open-access items have stimulated new indexes. One of these, the Directory of Open Access Journals was added to this version of the journals list.

I used to worry about the cost issue around the growing number of journals, but publishers have been making package deals with the online service providers making most of these journals available as part of larger journal subscription packages, which has benefited us all in terms of access (and indexing) of a larger number of journals.

The growth of Google Scholar has for all practical purposes eclipsed the commercial indexes developed by publishers (e.g. ABI-Inform, Wiley-Blackwell, etc.). Three sources for metrics with fairly broad coverage are SCOPUS (Elsevier's commercial database), Clarivate's Social Science Citation Index and the free Eigenfactor.org.

In 2003 the last prediction was "Getting published should be easier than ever. " That is truer than ever. Today estimates put the number of entrepreneurship academics in the world at around 8000. With 180 journals that would mean 44 faculty per journal. But my experience has suggested about one-third of entrepreneurship academics worldwide actually do research, which would mean about 15 academics per journal! This number compared to 20 in August 2018, 22 in January 2012, 35 in May 2003, 48 in April 2000, 53 in January 1999 and 67 in November 1997) . That seems like a lot, but recall that most journals publish 20-40 papers a year, and a lot of researchers work in teams. Suddenly you can see why papers are in short supply, especially good ones. Even saying all academics publish, 8000/180=44 academics per journal, and with a 50-person editorial board, you quickly realize that there are more publishing slots than papers.

With the involvement of the commercial publishers, who put pressure on editors to keep on schedule, you'd think the standards would drop - but commercial publishers always fear having a journal under their management being called low-quality, so there is a lot of pressure on editors to put in the effort to rework the marginal paper to make it acceptable. The standard for a revise and resubmit might be dropping, but the standard for published papers is not. That means a lot of editorial board members are spending a lot of time writing "developmental" reviews - reviews telling neophyte research authors how-to to the work they should have done the first time. Its tough on reviewers, but good for the field.

So armed with this information, take a look at the lists below. If you have recommended additions or corrections please let me know at jerome.katz@slu.edu.

Annual Research Reviews

Katz, J.A. and Corbett, A.C. Editors. Advances in the study of entrepreneurship firm emergence and growth . Emerald.

Hoskinson, S. & Kuratko, D. (Editors). Advances in the study of entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth. Emerald.

Annual Proceedings

Babson Entrepreneurship Research Conference, Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research. Babson College: Babson Park, MA.

International Council For Small Business World Conference Proceedings

US Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship Proceedings.

Refereed Scholarly Journals - Aimed at Entrepreneurship Academicians

I want to thank Előd-Tamás Albert of Saint Louis University's MBA program for the latest and most complete revision to date of the journals list. Earlier corrections and updates were done by Kim Hoe Looi of Xiamen University Malaysia and Ethan Leigh of Saint Louis University.

American Inventor

Asian Venture Capital Journal

Australian Venture Capital Journal

Black Enterprise (ABI)

Entrepreneur Magazine

European Venture Capital Journal

Inc. Magazine (ABI)

National Small Business Journal

The Network Journal's Website: A Magazine for Black Professionals and Entrepreneurs

Minority Business Entrepreneur (MBE) Magazine

Minority Business Today

Small Business Economic Trends (ABI)

The Small Business Journal

Small Business Reports (ABI)

Small Business Forum (ABI)

UK Venture Capital Journal

Venture Capital Journal

HISTORICAL NUMBERS: The total number of journals on the list from earlier times -

1999 - 40 journals

2001 - 53 journals

2011 - 122 journals

2015 - 123 journals

2016 - 139 journals

KEYWORDS: journals, journals list, entrepreneurship journals, infrastructure, entrepreneurship infrastructure,