Management journal honours ACU reviewer

Dr Bart de Jong from ACU’s Faculty of Law and Business was for the third time recognised as one of the prestigious journal’s best reviewers by its Editorial Review Board at the Academy of Management Conference in Chicago on August 12.

Dr de Jong, whose own research focuses on trust within teams, encouraged his peers to embrace academic review as a pathway to professional growth.

“I’ve noticed people look at the process of review as a difficulty. They feel that it’s an inconvenient and hostile hurdle, something that’s stood in the way of publication,” he said.

“My personal experience is that my papers have improved substantially because of the process. It can be formative in a good way.

“It’s really shaped papers in a way that I couldn’t have done myself. I’ve learned more through research and writing papers than I did during my PhD.”

In addition to his role as deputy director of the Centre for Sustainable Human Resource Management and Wellbeing, Dr de Jong has reviewed more than 100 submissions to seven management and organisational journals.

Each manuscript can take up to a day to review.

Remaining objective is vital to reviewing, especially if the submitted research falls within Dr de Jong’s specialty of trust in teams.

“It’s a blind review but some researchers have a special signature to their research and I will probably have a fair idea who it is,” he said.

“It’s the editor who decides, but I have one mode of reviewing and that’s to be critical yet constructive. I review the same way for any journal.”

The Academy of Management Journal is regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious scholarly journals in management.

Dr de Jong is a three-time recipient of its Best Reviewer Award, having been previously honoured in 2013 and 2015.

Candidates for this award are nominated by AMJ's Action Editors based on the consistent quality of their reviews, their turn-around time, and their review request acceptance rate.