IJEBR and the ISBE research community Free

In my first IJEBR editorial (Vol. 11 No. 5) I reviewed the articles which had been published since the journal was established in 1995. This review revealed a continuing interest in the topic of “entrepreneurial types”. Of course, such interest is consistent with the emergence of entrepreneurship as a distinct discipline and the continuing influence of Schumpeter’s (1934) seminal work. Recently, Emerald (IJEBR publisher) provided statistics for electronic access to the journal between June 2005 and June 2006. The two papers with the largest number of downloads (full-text) reflect this fascination with the nature of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. The top paper, “Entrepreneurship and the characteristics of the entrepreneurial personality” by Hannu Littunen (2000) was downloaded on 2927 occasions. This particular article continues to excite considerable interest and was downloaded 347 times in May 2006 and 184 times in June 2006. Second was a paper dealing with “The motivation to be an entrepreneur”(Segal et al., 2005) and this article was downloaded 2663 times. The fourth paper also reflects a strong interest in this topic, and Morrison’s (2000) article, “Entrepreneurship:what triggers it?”, was the subject of 1767 downloads. Paper three by Zhao (2005), with 1,857 downloads, was an exploration into“The synergy between entrepreneurship and innovation”. The remaining“top ten” papers (Table I) indicate interest in a range of important issues related to the management of smaller firms.

Returning to my original analysis of IJEBR, combining papers published in special issues with conventional papers indicated that “entrepreneurial learning” was the most frequently published topic featuring in 19 papers(12.5 per cent) compared to ten papers dealing with entrepreneurial types (6.6 per cent). Interesting, not one paper dealing with entrepreneurial education or learning appears in the list of top ten downloads for the full 17-month period. Taking the figures for June 2006, two papers on entrepreneurship education and learning feature in the top ten: Jack and Anderson (1999)are number two and Sullivan is number eight with 117 and 71 downloads respectively (Table II).

Other interesting statistics provided by the publisher are related to the countries in which downloads originated. Reflecting the “international reach” of the journal it is reassuring to see that papers are accessed from an extremely wide range of countries. Obviously the UK was responsible for the majority of downloads and the USA also recorded a substantial hit rate. “English”speaking countries, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, New Zealand and Canada,feature in the top 20. Similarly, other Commonwealth countries with historical links to the UK; India, Malaysia and Zimbabwe are strongly represented on the list. Sweden, Finland, and The Netherlands also have strong links to the UK academic community and therefore it is not surprising to find them in the top 20. More surprising, and encouraging, is that the journal is regularly accessed from Turkey, Greece and Iran (Table III). Significant omissions from the top 20 list include France and Germany (although both scrape into the top 30).

Perhaps the most important statistic relates to the volume of “traffic”to the IJEBR web site with almost 80,000 full paper downloads between June 2005 and June 2006. As noted above, the paper by Littunen was the most heavily downloaded during this period with over 3600 “hits”. The volume of downloads reflects the importance of the journal to individual academics and to the community as a whole. Another encouraging statistic is the increasing number of downloads. Comparing the first five months of 2005 with the same period in 2006 demonstrates that the monthly average downloads has more than doubled from 3,972 to 8,580. This demonstrates the growing importance of IJEBRas a mechanism for disseminating knowledge and information to the wider community of scholars, students as well as, hopefully, policy-makers and practitioners.

All five papers in this issue were originally presented at the ISBE(Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship) “Illuminating Entrepreneurship” Conference held in Blackpool in November 2005. I would like to thank all the authors and reviewers whose hard-work helped ensure that the papers were published in a timely fashion. In a dynamic field such as entrepreneurship it is clearly important to ensure that empirical research is widely available to the community (academics, policy-makers, politicians and practitioners) without too much delay. The papers themselves deal with a range of topics that are crucial to a better understanding of entrepreneurship and small firm management.

Ritchie and Lam begin with a review of all research papers presented at the ISBE Conference. As the authors point out, this presents an ideal opportunity to take stock of research activity based on a wide range of contributions including papers and expert opinions. The second paper by Mills and Pawson focuses on the experiences and sense-making activities of an entrepreneur as she attempted to establish her new business venture. A grounded theory approach was adopted to reveal how the entrepreneur’s perception of self influenced her ideas related to risk. In contrast to the case study approach adopted by Mills and Pawson, Gray draws on a large scale survey of more than 1,500 owner-managers. The study reveals that owner-managers’ age and educational background were crucial influences on the ability of small firms to absorb new knowledge. Marketing is a topic which perhaps attracts less attention than it should amongst the small firm research community. Simpson et al. adopt a mixture of quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (interviews) approaches to examine the issue of marketing in SMEs. The authors use this data to develop a model which helps demonstrate the way in which marketing is actually done in smaller firms. The final paper by Rouse and Jayawarna, uses a large-scale survey of participants in the NES (New Entrepreneur Scholarship) programme to examine“the finance gap” for those from disadvantaged backgrounds attempting to set-up new businesses. Given the political importance of enterprise,confirmation of the lack of funds available to nascent entrepreneurs certainly has implications of public policy in the UK.

I believe that this “ISBE issue” of IJEBR demonstrates the health of the research community in the UK and beyond. Hopefully, it will not be too long before some of these papers are featuring in the IJEBR “top ten” downloads.

Ossie Jones