Business and Management Research Editing and Proofreading Services

A paper shows that firms doing X perform better. It is a solid finding, carefully identified, and it will be rejected — because management journals do not publish findings, they publish theoretical contributions, and the question the reviewers will ask is what we now understand about how organisations work that we did not understand before. Answering that question is a different piece of writing from producing the result.

We edit what management and business researchers write — journal articles and their theory sections, theoretical contribution and positioning statements, hypothesis development and its logic, qualitative case study and process research writing, quantitative results and their interpretation, review and conceptual papers, practitioner-facing versions of academic work, thesis chapters and job market papers, and conference submissions and their development. Our editors work on the difference between a finding and a contribution.

The theoretical contribution is what management journals actually evaluate, and its failure is a well-executed empirical study with a literature-gap justification. "No prior study has examined X in the context of Y" is a gap and not a reason. We work through these so the contribution is stated as a change to a theory rather than an addition to a literature, since a paper that says a mechanism operates differently than the theory predicts, and explains why, is contributing and one that adds a variable is not; so the theory being contributed to is named specifically with the proposition being modified, because "the resource-based view" is a body of work and a contribution has to engage a claim within it; so the hypothesis development argues from a mechanism to a prediction rather than from prior findings to an expectation, given that a chain of citations ending in "we therefore hypothesise" is the field's commonest weak section; so the boundary condition is stated, as identifying where a theory stops holding is often the strongest available contribution and is regularly the paper's real finding; so the qualitative work is written so the reader can see how the constructs emerged from the data rather than being presented with them fully formed; so any practical implication names who would act and what they would do differently; and so the paper says what it would mean if the result were the other way. Papers written this way get reviewed on their theory.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, data and review correspondence. We are editors rather than management scholars, and we offer no view on your theory, methods or findings. What we can do is turn a finding into a contribution.