Pitfalls in writing a good paper in international business and export marketing: The case of International Journal of Export Marketing

The quantitative analysis reveals nine important reasons for the rejection of a paper. Also, based on the qualitative analysis of the reviewers' comments, there are nine categories derived from the 145 phrases/reasons for rejection namely, topic, abstract, introduction, literature, method findings, conclusions and references. The most frequent reasons for rejection are especially the literature review, the introduction and methodology. Additionally, there were problematic issues for example, the contribution of the study being missing; the paper not being sent to a proof-reader; the manuscript did not conform in terms of format, style and language, and there was a lack of novelty in the study. Furthermore, the hypotheses were not logical and not well-reasoned, the results did not conform to previous studies, and a central conclusion was missing. Finally, the study reveals 13 categories of rejected manuscripts, the most frequent of which dealt with export promotion, export performance, international brands and IJVs. Also, the majority of the 18 rejected papers were rejected by at least two reviewers. Conclusions, implications, limitations and future research are discussed.