Note from the publisher
Over the past 12 months we have initiated many changes at Emerald which we hope will be of benefit to our readers, our authors and hopefully our new authors. I would like to take this opportunity to highlight a summary of these enhancements:
As of Volume 10, BIJ will increase its issues by one to be a bi-monthly publication. You will now receive six issues of the journal. Not only will this bring you more content, it will prevent any unacceptable delays of accepted articles reaching publication.
I would like formally to welcome Dr Walter W.C. Chung, Professor John F. Dalrymple and Professor Shuichi Fukuda as new members of the Editorial Advisory Board.
We have improved and expanded our authors resources Web sites (www.emeraldinsight.com/literaticlub). Here you will find no end of useful information on how to get published, your copyright rights, call for papers, Literati Awards, etc. We also have two new sections: “Conference Central” will continue to grow to be a one-stop shop to find the most relevant conference to attend; and “Editing Service”puts authors, whose command of English is not up to publication standard, in touch with a person who, for a fee, will liase with the author to improve the grammar of their article.
Our Research Register (www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister/index.htm)continues to grow. This is an online forum for the circulation of pre-publication information. By registering and broadcasting your current research activities you will gain exposure to potential collaborators and will be put in the spotlight of Editors. It also informs our readers as to what is the cutting edge of current research.
The Managing Editors (myself included) have been running Author Workshops,both at international conferences and by invitation to university departments. These workshops provide an insight into the world of scholarly publishing and give advice to new authors on how to put their research findings into a piece of publishable work. If you feel that this service would be of use to your department or conference, then please do contact me.
The past 12 months have seen an excellent growth in the usage statistics of the Emerald Fulltext database. In this time the database has been access over 21 million times, from which in excess of 5.5 million articles have been downloaded. Over 800 universities, corporate and public institutions now subscribe to Fulltext.
The usage statistics of BIJ are also excellent. The journal has been viewed on-line over 190,000 times, from which nearly 58,000 articles have been downloaded. The most popular of these articles to date are:
“Successful implementation of Six Sigma: benchmarking General Electric Company” by Kim M. Henderson and James R. Evans, BIJ, Vol. 7 No. 4,pp. 260-82 (2000) with 1,309 downloads.
“Benchmarking performance management systems” by Amir M. Sharif, BIJ, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 62-85 (2002) with 1,155 downloads).
“An evolutionary approach to benchmarking” by P. Fernandez, I.P. McCarthy and T. Rakotobe-Joel, BIJ, Vol. 8 No. 4, pp. 281-305 (2001) with 797 downloads.
Electronic access is available not just to subscribers to the Fulltext database only, but also to all individual subscribers. No matter when your subscription to the journal commenced, by logging on to the journal you will have access to the full journal archive.
John McHaleManaging Editorjmchale@emeraldinsight.com
