The ethics of extended revisions

As any author knows, getting an article accepted for publication at a top, peer‐reviewed journal is a complex and arduous task. The review process is often a black box: Even if the process is well understood, the values or biases of the anonymous reviewers may be utterly opaque. Johns (2017), winner of the Academy of Management Review 2016 Decade Award for a paper titled “The Essential Impact of Context on Organizational Behavior,” noted that one reviewer had disliked his award‐winning paper (Johns, 2006) in all its iterations. I suspect that many of us have had similar experiences, whether or not our papers went on to win awards. The literature on how to review an article, and indeed on how reviewers' should moderate their biases, is replete with good advice (Lee, 1995). This is a topic that I have touched on in editorials (Davison, 2013, 2015) and elsewhere (Davison, de Vreede, & Briggs, 2005). Nevertheless, what of the author who has to do the revising? There is advice, much of it along the lines of “humbly do everything that the reviewers ask for and be grateful for the opportunity.” In a “publish or perish world,”most of us have little appetite for resistance and we duly revise, reworking our ideas in order to get past the gatekeepers. However, in the course of this revision process, which may span multiple versions over many months or years, the original paper and its freshly minted ideas are likely to change out of recognition, with little of the original work still left in the finished product. The peer‐review process, for all its faults, is widely applied and generally appreciated as helping authors improve the quality of their work, but one can have too much of a good thing. There is a significant risk that as authors revise, they move away from reporting the underlying objectives of their research to meeting the objectives of reviewers. Indeed, the more demanding reviewers may be utterly intransigent in expecting authors to meet their requirements. This reworking of material can certainly be a creative process, but is it an honest one? Reviewers may demand anything from greater methodological detail to new constructs/measures or more evidence. If these items are not available, were never collected, or do not exist, there may be a strong temptation to create them, a form of academic fraud that is firmly proscribed by codes of research ethics yet hard to detect if undertaken carefully. As each new version of a paper emerges, asymptotically edging closer to the final version, so the palimpsest gets thicker, the contribution more exciting and significant, yet the integrity of the researcher with respect to an honest and objective representation of the original research may be ever flimsier. One effect of all this revising may be to remove much of the contextual richness (the dirty washing) of the paper, with the result that while the finished paper may satisfy the reviewers, it may fail to provide readers with the story that the author intended. Some authors may choose to withdraw their paper if they feel that it is straying too far from the paper that they wanted to write or the research that they actually undertook, yet most of us are held in thrall to the publish or perish process and will sell our souls to the devil if necessary. However, there must come a time when enough is enough. Perfection is not the goal nor necessarily is satisfying all reviewers: A persistently negative review need not be the death knell of a paper, since reviewers do not have a democratic vote on the final decision of a paper. I thus exhort authors not to fall into the trap of fraudulently creating evidence: This is the kiss of death to anyone who is caught. At the same time, I admonish reviewers not to demand the impossible and editors of all stripes to uphold their prerogative to intervene and make objective and appropriate decisions, especially where reviewers hold diametrically opposing views or are intransigent in their demands. In this second issue of 2018, we present seven papers. In the first paper, Willison, Warkentin, and Johnston (2018) apply a multi‐theoretical model to explain employees' intentions to abuse computers. The authors investigate the role of two forms of organizational justice (distributive and procedural) both of which provide explanations of how