The top 10 papers of the European Management Journal

Bhukya, Paul, Kastanakis and Robinson (2021) recently conducted a bibliometric analysis of papers that have appeared in the European Management Journal, EMJ. Since its inception in 1982, until 2020, EMJ has published 2164 articles. EMJ is a prestigious management journal with an acceptance rate of just 8%. I had previously published a paper in EMJ with Matthias Holweg, Jan Holmström, and Johanna Småros in 2005, entitled Supply chain collaboration: Making sense of the strategy continuum.

Emerald Publishing previously gave a Citation of Excellence Award for this paper. It was one of the best 50 Management Papers in 2005. Over 40,000 articles were reviewed from 1,500 journals. The paper itself, used a water tank analogy to conceptualize the dynamic behavior of supply chains with different information sharing strategies. It one of the few non-mathematical papers I have written. It builds upon my PhD and the early supply chain dynamics research I did at the start of my career with Jan and Johanna. Matthias did an excellent job, bringing industrial examples and translating technical work into a paper for a general audience.

Since then the paper has attracted lot of citations (it has 957 citations in Google Scholar in Feb 2023). It regularly appears in my teaching and consulting work. Bhukya et al.’s study put the paper as the 9th most cited paper in EMJ and the most influential EMJ paper in both the strategic management and the supply chain management categories. Who would have thought I would co-author one of the most influential papers in the field of strategic management?

UPDATE: In June 2022 Jan Holmström and I were interviewed by Paula Karlsson-Brown, Special Media Editor for EMJ, to talk about our paper for the 40th Anniversary of the European Journal of Management. A video was made of the interview. It comes in four parts, you can watch them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.