Growth Strategy of The International Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business

Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to analyze the current status of various fusion research journals and its operational strategies, comparing them to those of IJIDB. Research design, data, and methodology - This study focused on the content analysis and strategies of operations for other convergence journals, comparing them to IJIDB in terms of the number of publication journals, publications, academic scope, and the impact factor. Results - IJIDB is relatively new and in its developmental stages compared to other convergence journals. But, IJIDB also shows much promise in that it came second in the field of economic publications of 54 journals in 2017. In order to To elevate IJIDB journal to the top in Korea Citation Index Journals, KODISA should host more international conferences to increase its international recognition levels, develop its managerial functions for increased stability, and open more opportunities for Candidates of Ph.D and Masters degree students to publish for fostering and building potential leaders and innovators. Conclusions - IJIDB is a newly born academic journal. In the future, IJIDB will be able to develop exponentially and be one of the leading journals in the Korea Citation Index by continually learning and developing its operational strategies.

1. Introduction

With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, all industrial sectors demand a new paradigm that is reflected in social talents. This has pervasive affects across all academic disciplines, which also include universities. In line with this, the convergence and knowledge sharing in the cross-industry sector is expanding and the academic groups and journals based on convergence are increasing. (Hwang, Lee, Youn, Kim, Lee, Shin, Kim, Kim, Lee, & Kim, 2016).

Since its publication in 2010, IJIDB has been selected as an index of the Korean Research Foundation's Journal of Citation Index (KCI) in 2017 through its publications and the stable operations of consistently publishing high quality academic papers. In addition, efforts are being made to improve the scope of the thesis and develop further into a mature and impactful academic journal. Thus, the present study aims to establish strategies for improving on many areas for IJIDB based on the comparisons that have been analyzed on other papers in this field as well. 

2. A breakthrough of IJIDB in 2018

2.1. Implementation of IJIDB in 2018

According to the Korea Research Foundation (NRF) statistics, the total number of journals counted to be 2,378 as of March 2018, including 2,019 types of KCI indexed registered journals and 359 types of KCI candidate registered journals (NRF, 2018) (Table 1). Of these, 1,425 journals in the humanities and social sciences accounted for 59.9% of the total. More precisely, there are more journals in the social sciences than any other discipline, and there are 712 entries in the KCI indexed journal and 142 entries in the KCI candidate journal. The journals corresponding to 35.9% of the total journals are registered.

Table 1: Current Overall status of KCI indexed journals

Source: KCI Homepage (December, 2018)

In the social sciences, a discipline where the majority of the journals exist, the IJIDB Impact Factor is 1.35, which was the second highest among 58 journals in the field of economics. This can be seen as the fruits of the continuous managementation of the citation rate at the institute level, the recruitment of excellent papers, and the dedication of the directors and members of the institute in their work. In direct correlation with this, this journal was selected as the index of the KCI index of the Korea Research Foundation in 2018.

Table 2: Brief History of IJIDB Journal

Table 3: Current status of IJIDB

Figure 1: IJIDB Journal Covers, 2019

Source: IJIDB Journal Homepage(2019).

The executives of the Korea Distribution Science Society decided to make 2017 the first year in the second phase development of the mountain study journal, and was greatly able to improve the articles of association, scope and executives of the journal. First, we changed from publishing only English papers to incorporating a mixture of both English and Korean articles. We implemented changes so that the journal was set to publish four times a quarter, once a quarter, once a month for 12 times a year. In addition, the scope of the discipline limited to the field of distribution science has been further expanded to include additionally related disciplines such as industrial economics, industrial management, and other convergence fields. This is characterized by topics ranging from application economics, health care, agroeconomics, behavioral consumer economics, information systems, Travel, and hotel management. This was in accordance with laying the foundations for handling the complex and diverse academic needs of the 4th Industrial Revolution era.

2.2. Summary of IJIDB Journals

The IJIDB Journal has published fifteen papers in 2016, but has made remarkable progress since then to 128 paper publications in 2018. Along with this phenomenon, diversity has been developed in the academic field as well. The journal published in 24 academic fields in 2017, and it was extended to 30 different academic fields in 2018, which shows that the academic fields have dramatically been expanded. As shown in [Table 4], if the frequency of thesis on topics such as Economics, Management Information, and Social Issues was high in 2017, then in 2018, it was shown that the fields of Logistics & SCM, Finance Economy, and Social Issues were high. As such, IJIDB's journals are used in a wide variety of academic fields such as economics, business, management, marketing, information management, and business management. 

Table 4: Major Publication Fields of IJIDB

2.3. Journal Submissions and Rejection Status

A total of 185 papers were submitted and of those, 138 papers were published in IJIDB. Overall, the approval rate is 74.6%, which is higher from 56.2% in 2015 and 50.8% in 2016. Reflecting on this data, it can be seen that the IJIDB's editorial team needs to amass additional efforts in making sure that the quality of the articles that are published are of improved quality. 

It would be surmised that the IJIDB editorial team stabilized the approval / approval rate for each issue through their hard work and dedication to the quality of the publications.

3. Quality control of reviews

Recently, according to the academic demand for fusion science in the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution, there has been an increasing number of cases of publishing journals in one academic society by presenting many academic disciplines as a fusion society (Hwang, Kim, Youn, Lee, & Lee, 2014; Hwang, Lee, Lee, Kim, Yang, Youn, & Kim, 2015; Hwang, & Youn, 2016). Particularly, the relevant institutes have shown the tendency to enlarge by increasing the number of journals published and organizing through the management of specialized institute operators. Therefore, one existing academic society deals with one specialty area and moves away from the format of one journal (Kim, & Youn, 2012; Kim, Kim, & Youn, 2010), which deals with various academic areas.

Among various cases related to this, the Humanities and Social Sciences Technology Convergence Society in [Figure 2] studies Humanities research and Industrial Technology convergence of IT, BT, and NT industries, Development, Dissemination and Technology Development Strategy. The details are given in [Table 5].

Table 5: Submissions and Rejection Rate of IJIDB

Most of the journals do not limit the scope of their academic field, but treat and publish different articles across all disciplines. The IJIDB (Journal of Mountain Reseach) of Korea Distribution Science Society is also a very encouraging part of the academic field since 2017, but its academic scope is still limited compared to other journals. In the future, it will be necessary to delve deeper into the academic field of the Journal of the Mountain Ridge Journal. Additionally, it will become imperative and necessary to start from the field of convergence with the adjacent academic field in the short term. 

In particular, most of these fusion-related journals have great features in management, and they have a very wide range of academic fields and their number of expert judges. Most convergent scholarly journals are invited by jury members of various majors and have established their own domain to suit their academic field needs.

Table 6: Characteristics of Convergence related Society

The Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Technology and Convergence has three sister journals and publishes twelve journals a year. The Korea Convergence Institute has one journal of the Korea Convergence Institute and publishes 6 issues a year. However, through thorough management, the Influence Index is maintained in the latter half of the five points.

4. Current issues and challenges

4.1. Current problems

As of late, IJIDB applied to SCOPUS in June 2018 and received the final screening result in March 2019. The results elucidated that there were some factors that needed to be addressed in order to be reconsidered for SCOPUS in the future. There were some factors that needed to be revised and the results are as follows.

First, it could be seen that despite having publications for some time, not many of the articles in these journals were referenced by other articles in SCOPUS, which could indicate a lack of exposure. There was also the issue of uneven quality of the scholarly articles throughout the journal that will have to be attended to for future publications. 

Second, most of the published abstracts were of poor quality, not providing an encompassing summary of the study. Additionally, the language as well the grammar of the papers were lacking, suggesting that the editorial management needed to be strengthened for additional screening before publication. IJIDB was selected as a candidate to be listed in KCI in 2015 and listed in KCI in 2017.

Third, the international level of the journal compared to the journal name was not yet achieved. Although the journal states international in the title, there was a lack of international diversity in the authors who published, as well as the editors. It could be seen that most were from Korea and did not align with the aims and scope of this journal. In the future, the international level will need to be reflected on the increased diversity of the authors, as well as the editors, in order to offer fresh insight and novel perspectives for this journal. The editorial team will need to be diversified and modified for the future of this international journal. 

4.2. Future strategies

Currently, the mountain climbing research book needs stabilization in 2017. Also, the contribution rate of the journal is not stable. New journals in the field of fusion research are intensifying in the external competition environment. Therefore, it is necessary to pursue and implement several developmental plans for heightened quality of this journal in the future. 

First, the number of English papers and Korean papers should be expanded in order to foster mountain peering research papers together with KODISA as global SCI level entry points. It is not easy to manage the coverage rate due to the low contribution rate of the current papers. It is difficult to get a good evaluation on the inspections, so it is necessary to promote through various domestic and foreign channels in the future.

Second, qualitative growth of a mountain study book is necessary. It is essential to make efforts to keep the authors' adherence to the submission procedure and research ethics thoroughly. The policies will need to be enforced to support the publication of improved papers by going through the revising process as much times as necessary to produce a high quality research paper. In order to do this, we must support the revision service (Korean editing) provided by the society and the native language correction as well.

Third, active participation of overseas scholars is necessary for regional scholarly distribution. It is necessary to support more international scholars to register as a member of KODISA and the Mountain Ridge Researching Society by carrying out active publicity of international academic conferences held twice a year.

Fourth, diversification of the academic field is needed. It is a reality that the scholarly research papers which denote the fusion related journals are still limited in the academic field as compared with the other fusion journals. This is due to factors such as the difficulty of operating the academic journals and the difficulty of accepting judges. However, if we include academic fields such as business education, distribution education, entrepreneurship education, online corporate education through convergence with the field of education from the fields of economics and business administration, for example, and gradually spreading the convergence field, this will aid in solidifying the status as a top academic journal.

Next, in order to expand investment in academic journals, it is necessary to strengthen the independence of academic journals and to actively support corporations through industry-academia cooperations on nonprofit academic societies. In particular, it will be imperative to actively attract members who are working in the industry to consider sponsoring company-level academic societies. In the case of large-scale academic events, it should be possible to organize academic and outwardly balanced events through the creation of external funds.

Finally, various efforts are needed for the distribution of scholars in each region. First, domestic academic organizations are divided into metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas, and are often operated according to its unique regional characteristics. The structure of these regional academic institutions will only add to the obstacles and will not help to advance to world-class academic institutions through internationalization. Therefore, it is necessary to promote the participation of many scholars in universities by attracting members from various universities in the country and by actively collaborating with universities abroad.

IJIDB is in the year of its first year growth in 2019. A lot of effort is needed to consolidate its position as the best professional academic journal in Korea and to be a leading global academic journal in the future.