Call for Paper

Call for Position Papers

The Editors of Electronic Markets invite well-known scholars with relevant expertise in the topic areas of electronic markets and networked business to write a position paper on a salient issue of their choice.

Electronic Markets is a quarterly journal edited at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, and the University of Leipzig, Germany, and published by Springer. First published in 1991, EM was the first journal to report on the developments and trends in electronic commerce as well as the policies, system concepts, methodologies, impacts, and cultural changes related to this rapidly evolving field. As such the journal embraces the entire range of electronic “market” issues - covering not just transactions but also the wider process of business collaboration as, for example, information, negotiation, trust, customer relationships, electronic procurement, supply chain management, electronic services and all aspects of the evaluation, introduction and management of the underlying business software systems and user devices.
Position papers should offer novel and fresh perspectives, opening new areas of discourse, or addressing unsettled research questions and issues important to electronic markets and networked business. They should be well argued and articulated to address emergent, controversial, even paradoxical issues. Authors (with a well established reputation from academia, industry or government) will have a profound knowledge of the area about which they write. Position papers should develop rigorous, evidence-based arguments and apply scholarly reasoning and logic.
 
Before submitting a proposal for a position paper, authors are asked to check that the following criteria apply:

• the author is a mature researcher and well-established scholar who has been following the academic discourse of the subject matter for many years
• the paper provides a scholarly overview of an emergent or current research topic and gives new insights and access to the academic discussion (e.g. in the form of a history of ideas, synthesis of different research stances or a new classification of the topic area)
• the author should express an opinion or a recommendation (this could be controversial or provocative) and may lead to rejoinders and lively discussion

How to submit a position paper:

Position papers go through a two-step procedure.

(1) In the first step the author submits an abstract (1 to 2 pages in length) outlining their ideas. The abstract should address the above list of criteria. The author will then receive feedback from the editorial board including an invitation to submit a full version of the paper in those cases where the final paper is expected to be of high interest to the readers of Electronic Markets.

(2) Position papers will be somewhat shorter in length (about 6500 words) than regular Electronic Markets research papers. The full version of the paper will be reviewed by at least two Associate Editors of EM and, if necessary, well-established peers with expertise on the paper’s topic. A final acceptance decision will be made by the Editor-in-Chief.

Abstracts should be sent in an e-mail to editors(at)electronicmarkets.org. The proposal can either be copied into the e-mail or attached in a pdf file.

Examples for position papers are:

Carr, Nicholas G. (2003): IT Doesn’t Matter, in: Harvard Business Review, Vol. 81, No. 5, pp. 41-49.

George, Joey F.; Valacich, Joseph S.; Valor, Josep (2005): Does Information Systems Still Matter? Lessons for a Maturing Discipline, in: Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 219-232.

Sutton, R.I.; Staw, B.M. (1995): What Theory is Not, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3, September 1995, pp. 371-384

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