AMPlify your scholarship: Why AMP is (also) where your work should be
With an ABS ranking of 4, a 5-year impact factor of 9.4, and the status and infrastructure of the 20,000-member Academy of Management backing it, Academy of Management Perspectives (AMP) is a premier outlet to showcase your scholarly work. So why aren't you submitting your work to us?
My aim is not to convince you to publish in AMP instead of other premier journals. Rather, I want to make you aware of the merits of publishing in AMP in addition to other premier journals. I want you to know that by publishing in AMP, you can get more out of your hard work.
AMP is a complementor, not a competitor. We are not competing with other top scholarly journals for your contributions to management theory. We are a means of AMPlifying your theoretical contributions to reach the realms of practice and policy. Publish your contributions to theory wherever you find most fitting, but don't stop there. Take the next important step to make your work matter to managers by also publishing in AMP.
Nowadays, even pure theory journals require authors to espouse managerial implications. But I think we all know that tacking a few paragraphs on to the end of a study, offering suppositions and suggestions for how managers might make sense of the scholarly work, has little influence on managerial practice. It's a starting point, but it's also usually the ending point.
AMP is here to help you develop your work in ways that truly impact policy and practice. This doesn't come naturally, after decades of intense focus on theory. But we have a format to follow. Look at our website to see how our papers are structured. It's helpful to put your paper into our format, but we won't reject your paper in initial rounds based solely on formatting.
Yes, you must take on substantive additional work to publish in AMP. We don't accept simple managerial translations of published studies. You must conduct original empirical or conceptual work that makes a novel contribution. But if you have done the groundwork in a theory driven paper, then you can draw from and extend these established ideas into practice without starting from scratch. Or you could start with AMP, outlining a managerial problem from scratch and rigorously analyzing it to reveal actionable insights, then later extend these insights into a theoretical contribution in another journal. Interest in the practical insights of your AMP paper can later drive citations to your theory paper and vice versa – synergy! But the real bonus: your hard work may lead to meaningful change in policy and practice. Mattering matters!
We have two other formats through which you can build on your hard work to influence practice. Practitioner Perspectives bring a senior scholar together with a senior practitioner to outline specific areas of practice and policy that warrant further rigorous scholarly analysis. Constructive Confrontations bring opposing sides together to jointly conduct a novel study to abate an ongoing debate. These two formats start with a structured proposal, making the path to publication a bit less risky.
Look, AMP is a high-profile outlet through which you can extend your publication portfolio in important ways that influence managerial practice and policy. Please continue to make important contributions to theory, but in addition, submit your fitting work here. And spread the word!
AMPly yours,
Michael L. Barnett, Editor-in-Chief
Academy of Management Perspectives
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Michael Barnett
Professor
Rutgers University
Newark NJ
(973) 353-3697
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