for a change in the leadership. Prof. Joshy Jacob has taken over as the new Chief. Editor of Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers at the end of March 2018. I.
Editor’s Note
VIKALPA The Journal for Decision Makers 43(2) vii–viii © 2018 Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0256090918781107 http://journals.sagepub.com/home/vika
I
t has been three years since I took over the editorship of Vikalpa and it is time for a change in the leadership. Prof. Joshy Jacob has taken over as the new Chief Editor of Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers at the end of March 2018. I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on the three years of my journey with Vikalpa. When I took over in March 2015, we just signed a partnership agreement with SAGE publication for five years. As per the agreement, IIM Ahmedabad will have full editorial control on the journal and SAGE will help us with publishing and marketing of the journal. At that time, Vikalpa was already one of the most respected management journals in India and one of our goals was to take the journal to the next level in terms of improving the visibility and quality of the manuscript pool we receive. Indexing in established scholarly databases was one of the strategies to accomplish this goal. We are very happy that Vikalpa is now part of several databases, including one of the largest databases in the world, SCOPUS. Vikalpa is being indexed in SCOPUS starting from its 1996 volume and this process is expected to be completed by the end of this year. We are also hoping to apply soon for a classification under the Australian Business Dean’s Council (ABDC) list of journals. We have also strived to expand our network of scholars reviewing the manuscripts submitted to Vikalpa; in particular, the international scholars. We are happy to note that over the last three years we received enthusiastic response from several international scholars to our request for reviews. In this process, however, some of the authors might have experienced delays in the processing of their manuscripts. Identifying potential reviewers in a specific area of research and persuading them to agree to review manuscripts is a time consuming process – there have been occasions when we had to send a manuscript to more than half a dozen reviewers before we found one willing to review.
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In order to expedite and enhance the quality of review process, we have also constituted a team of associate editors, who are experts in research areas in which we receive significant number of manuscripts. We are going to streamline this process further in coming months to maximize the contributions of our associate editors. Finally, since our partnership with SAGE in 2015, we have also been able to track some important metrics related to the journal. We are glad to note that one such metric – the number of full-text downloads of Vikalpa’s articles – had seen an increase from 5,000 in 2015 to 77,000 in 2016. This is not really a “trend” yet but we hope to see a continued upward movement in the coming years on this and other relevant metrics such number of citations. Please allow me to end this with a note of thanks to many who helped me in this journey over the past three years. Our editorial team (Mitali Sarkar, Diana Joseph, and Pala Detharia) forms the central pillar of the journal and without their support it would be unimaginable that I could sustain the record of more than 40 years of uninterrupted publication of Vikalpa. I am grateful to the SAGE team, especially the three peer review associates – Taru, Shivani and Isha, who have worked with me on almost a daily basis to ensure smooth running of the journal processes. The team of associate editors has made my job significantly easier with their timely advice on a number of manuscripts for which my own expertise was not enough to arrive at a fair decision. My sincere thanks to them. One of my major accomplishments was constituting an editorial advisory board comprising some of the most distinguished management scholars in the world. It was an honour to work with them and I will always be grateful for their support and contributions to the journal. We are very fortunate to have a strong community of Vikalpa reviewers, authors, subscribers, and readers without whose continued loyalty to the journal, none of our accomplishments would be possible. We look forward to their continued support and assure that we will continue to strive towards excellence in publishing insightful and meaningful management research. Finally, my thanks to the Directors and all other administrative staff of IIM Ahmedabad for their unstinted support and encouragement for the journal. I will continue to be involved with Vikalpa as an executive committee member and will work with the new Editor in implementing several new plans to improve the quality and standing of Vikalpa. We look forward to the continued support from the Vikalpa community. Rama Mohana R Turaga
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