The Portuguese Journal of Management Studies started publication in 1993 as “Estudos de Gestão” with very simple procedures to promote improved quality and reliability of Portuguese scientific findings in its field.

In 1999 a number of changes were introduced with the approval of a new set of regulations. The double blind referee processe, the invitation to new members from national and international universities to join the editorial board and the possibility of publishing articles in English are the most relevant. The journal was renamed “Estudos de Gestão – The Portuguese Journal of Management Studies” to reflect the fact that accepted papers either in Portuguese or English.

The Journal in Numbers 1999-2005

Table 1 – Acceptance Rate in Regular and Special Issues

Table 2 – Number of articles and authors per issue and volume

One of the journal’s main concerns has been its conversion into a true independent journal. Although belonging to ISEG, it was important that the journal should not be considered as a place where ISEG faculty was invited to publish preferentially. And this has become true. The journal is now completely independent of ISEG faculty in terms of author affiliation, with only 13% of the total number of authors associated with ISEG.
As Table 3 documents, the number of references per issue, while volatile during the time period under analysis, is now converging to a standard of thirty references per article. This should be considered a good standard for this kind of publication. However, given the broad spectrum of articles accepted for publication, we may have to keep this topic as an open issue. We emphasise that we accept either very specific and recent research topics as well as literature surveys, even in very established fields of management.

Table 3 – Number of references, Average Citing Life and Citing Half-Life per issue and volume

Average Citing Life - is the number of publication years from the current year that account for the average age of current citations published by a journal in its article references.
Citing Half-Life - is the number of publication years from the current year that account for 50% of the current citations published by a journal in its article references.
The average citing life of a paper is the number of publication years from the current year that account for the average age of current citations published in its article references. It includes all the references, even the most aged, used in the article. This figure helps to evaluate the age of the majority of articles referenced by a paper and if averaged by issue or year entitles you to evaluate the age of the majority of articles referenced by journal. A long average citing life is not good or bad in itself. However, it helps you to make inferences about changes in the publication policy or in the type of printed articles. After computing the average citing life for each article we averaged them by issue.
The Portuguese Journal of Management Studies shows a tendency towards stabilising its citing half-life around 8 years, which is last year’s figure. Just for benchmarking, Strategic Management Journal shows a citing half-life of 9.2 and the Academy of Management Journal shows a citing half-life of 9.6. Using the 2004 Journal of Citation Report – Social Science Edition, in the ISI Web of Knowledge, within the “Business” subject category, we find that 58% of the journals show a citing half-life higher than 8 years.

The final analysis goes to the content of the articles published in this period. Finance, Accounting and Tax articles tended to dominate the journal content with more than 40% of the articles (Table 4). This was not the result of any journal policy and we wish that authors from other fields to submit their articles. Their contribution will always be very welcome.

Table 4 – Number of articles per field of knowledge