The SMART Tool: Encouraging Standardized and Replicable Research in Management to Enhance Credibility

Strategic management research faces increasing calls concerning our work's relevance, reliability and credibility. Management journals have addressed these concerns by elevating the expectations for scholars during the publication process, such as publishing code, scripts and data. While the authors’ believe these changes are necessary for the field's long-term success, in the short term, there is a high resource cost for researchers (many with temporal constraints) to adjust to these new expectations. In this paper, the authors aim to decrease this cost on Strategic Management researchers in two ways. First, the authors discuss the vision, strengths and step-by-step instructions for the emerging code-sharing instrument – The SMART tool (Standardized Measures that are Accurate, Replicable and Time-saving, available at http://www.smartdatatool.net/) – for Strategic Management research. Second, the authors discuss some essential conditions for the tool's benefits to be fully realized by the field. Together, this paper offers the initial steps for creating a collaborative and open-source ecosystem for code and data in Strategic Management research that can strengthen stakeholder confidence in the field.