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Author Guidelines

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We welcome contributions from academics and from practitioners, who may be consultants or managers. Your contributions will be reviewed and judged against the following criteria:

• Exploration of new ideas and new approaches
• Contribution to evolution of strategic and organisational thinking
• Relevance, validity and usefulness to managers, and to academics that teach them

Your article should deal with an important management problem or a major strategic issue. We are particularly interested in pieces that offer a new way of thinking about an issue; a new management practice that improves performance; or a new phenomenon that has importance for organisations. Your article should explain your core idea (which could be a practice) simply and clearly, and wherever possible explain how this idea or practice fits with current knowledge (by referring to previous literature on the subject). Your article is likely to be more attractive if it presents original research that validates the idea. We welcome evidence that is based on either statistical work and/or case studies. It is vital that your submission has clear practice implications. We encourage all authors to look at some recent issues of the journal, since our style changed dramatically since 2000.

In addition to traditional styled pieces, LRP: Long Range Planning is committed to publishing material that documents in a careful manner important phenomena that are relevant to academic theorising and management practices. For more details please see the Call for Phenomenon Based Research     

It is obvious that your piece needs to be well written. We encourage authors from non-Anglo Saxon countries to submit their work, but we suggest that before submission you consider having your piece reviewed by professional text editors. We can put you in touch with editors experienced in such work.

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HINTS ON WHAT GETS PUBLISHED (TIPS AND TRICKS!)

Audience
Your piece should be interesting and attractive to our dual audience. These consist of senior managers who have an MBA (or equivalent) from a good quality school, many of whom are also highly trained technically. Your piece should also be of interest to academics in business and managerial field.

What we like
- Catchy topics (we love being hooked by papers’ introductions!)
- Practical examples. Can you exemplify your arguments with one or two real-life stories, all the better if they are original?
- Robust data about an interesting phenomenon (multiple sources are better!)
- Reliable measures (are you really measuring what you claim you are?)
- Straightforward methods and analyses
- We appreciate very much the gift of synthesis (and we quite dislike redundancy).

LRP Standard
LRP is here to publish your work, not to give you hard time! But you have to rise to the challenge of providing us with a really compelling piece.

Typical article structure
Introduction
Describe the problem you are going to tackle and explain us why it is an important subject to address. Make your issue compelling by grounding it into a clear context. Such an introduction is vital whether you are offering a new way of thinking, a new business tool, details of a new management practice or describing a new and important phenomenon.

Literature review
Comment on key authors who have discussed your issue before. Identify the gap in such literature and make clear why it is important to fill it.

Data and Methods
Provide brief methodological summary in the main text, with perhaps an exhibit. Make sure that all method details, tables and necessary specifications are available in a proper appendix.

Analysis
Make the analysis fit for the purpose. Statistical methods need to be robust, case methods need to be clear about what is measured and what caused what.

Discussion
This is a very important part of the paper, and typically makes or breaks the piece. Consider dividing it in two separate parts, one for managers and practitioners, the other for academics.

Diagrams
Good figures and tables can often make or break a paper, so it is worth spending time on them! They often can tell your story better than text can, by illustrating your ideas and capturing and focusing the important points. You should aim to have at least one exhibit on each of these points: the idea, the sample and data, the results, lessons for managers, lessons for academics.

Copy editing
Authors (especially those whose native language is not English) should consider having their work checked by professionals before submission. We are able to supply the names of people who can assist here. The costs of these services must be paid for by the authors.

Prior Publication
Submissions are on the understanding that they are the original work of the authors presenting the paper. If parts of the work have been published before (including tables, etc), this should be indicated in the letter to the editor and in the paper. It does not necessarily preclude consideration.

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IMPORTANT DETAILED STYLE & SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Title Page. Supply names of authors and full address and affiliation and email address on title page, with list of any acknowledgements.

Biographical note (page 2). Supply a short biographical note (5 lines) giving the author's full name, appointment, and institution or organization/company, and recent professional attainments. We no longer publish photographs.

Abstract (page 3). An abstract should be included, in the form of an executive summary of between 200 and 400 words. (However, please note that the Executive Summary that appears in the Journal will be devised by the Editorial staff.)

Text. Please try to keep your text to no more than 30 double spaced pages in 12 point type (for easy reading). There is no space limit on tables, figures and appendices, so consider using exhibits or appendices to reduce the length and maintain the flow of your text.

Figures, Tables and Exhibits. All figures, tables and exhibits should be consecutively numbered in Arabic numerals in the text and a marker (such as 'Insert Figure 1 here') should be used in the text to indicate where the figure should be placed. Please put exhibits, tables and figures at the end of the text, if necessary in separate computer files. Make sure that any diagrams are both readable and printable and if possible drawn in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.

References. These should appear as endnotes (we do not accept footnotes), and numbered consecutively in superscript Arabic numerals. We only accept one endnote for any sentence, and prefer only one per paragraph: this may mean multiple references need to be bunched together.

Wherever possible full bibliographic details (e.g. volume number, issue number or date, page numbers, publisher, year of publication) should be included. Please cite only relevant references and try to avoid listing the same paper more than once.

We use standard academic style for citations, as follows:
• For an article: Author, Article Title, Journal Title, Volume (Number), page numbers (year).
• For a book chapter: Author, Chapter Title, Editors of Book, Book Title, publisher, city of publication, page numbers (year).
• For a book: Author, Title, publisher, city of publication, page numbers (year).

Submission Procedures. Please submit your manuscript electronically in Microsoft Word or similar well-known format to Alessandra Marsh, Editorial Assistant at lrp@city.ac.uk . If we do not acknowledge a paper, we have not received it! So if you don’t hear from us within a week, email us again, including the files.

Please note that we now insist on having an electronic copy - the review process is speedier if we can e-mail your paper on rather than sending hard copies by `snail mail´! Please do not send zipped files: our spam filters block all zip files, and your work will not reach us.

Off-prints. Authors will receive 50 free off-prints, except where they have been paid a fee. An off-print order form will be sent to authors for purchasing additional off-prints: orders for these must be received before printing to qualify for lower pre publication rates. All co-author off-print requirements should be included on the off-print order form.

Copyright. All authors must sign the 'Transfer of Copyright' agreement before the article can be published. This transfer agreement enables Elsevier Science Ltd to protect the copyrighted material for the authors, but does not relinquish the author's proprietary rights. The copyright transfer covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute article, including reprints, photographic reproductions, microform or any other reproductions of similar nature and translations, and includes the right to adapt the article for use in conjunction with computer systems and programs, including reproduction or publication in machine-readable form and incorporation in retrieval systems. Authors are responsible for obtaining from the copyright holder permission to reproduce any figures for which copyright exists.

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REVIEW AND PUBLICATION PROCESS

Every manuscript submitted to our journal is initially seen by the Editor. If the submission obviously does not meet the standards of LRP and/or falls out of its area of interest, the paper will be rejected at the outset. Otherwise, submissions will go on to the review process.

The Editor decides who will referee the piece and requests that all comments be sent back speedily. All reviews are undertaken `blind´: the referee does not know who the authors are and vice versa, so that comments are objective. The role of the reviewers is to be constructive and to advise the editor; reviewers do not decide the fate of a manuscript alone. The journal has a policy of publishing all material that meets the criteria.

Our stated goal is to respond to your manuscript within 4 months of submission. This gives time for thoughtful comments from busy reviewers (and a busy editor). Our actual performance is pretty good: historically we respond to 80% of manuscripts within 4 months, and 98% of manuscripts within 6 months.

Once accepted, an article is sent to be copy edited and type-set, a process which takes a month or two. You will be involved in adjusting the text to improve the flow of ideas or to correct minor errors, and asked to check proofs. Articles are typically published electronically within two months of receipt. The print runs appear shortly after.

PLEASE NOTE that it is very unusual for a paper to be accepted unaltered from the outset. It often happens that we like what you write, but seek to add value to your work with suggestions for improvement that come from skilled outside perspectives. So be prepared for us to work with you to make your paper even stronger – it will be to your advantage as well as ours!

 
Long Range Planning - International Journal of Strategic Management
Cass Business School 106 Bunhill Row, London, EC1Y 8TZ, UK