Introduction

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise." (W. Somerset Maugham; English Writer, 1874-1965)

"The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism." (Norman Vincent Peale; American Author, 1898-1993)

"Scholarly Criticism (SC)" is the one and only show in the world serving as a "whistleblower," identifying erroneous research conducted and reported by business management researchers and published in business journals. We follow an "investigative journalism" approach to explore academic research and publishing misconducts, unethical research and publishing practices, and unethical for-profit academic journal indexing/abstracting operations. We know that there exist hundreds and thousands of journals publishing within the domain of business management, so we cannot look at each one following the basic rule in statistics, i.e., "Population." Therefore, we focus on so-called top-tier, leading business management journals indexed in so-called reputed and high-quality for-profit databases, i.e., Clarivate's Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus.

Our Methodology

We take samples collected using convenience sampling from the defined population of business management journals and apply "scientific methods" (observation, identification, analysis, ethics) to analyze the articles. The scientific handling of articles includes an initial review by editor(s), selection of articles reflecting only major theoretical/empirical concerns, looking at the research design, identification of problems, gaps, and how research question(s) was/were proposed, method adopted for literature review, theoretical support, hypotheses development, research models and frameworks, population and sampling, sampling methods, instruments selection and psychometric reporting, adopted analysis techniques, data and statistical analysis, reporting of results, implications, orthographic/copy/language editing, and compliance with standard referencing/citations frameworks.

Our Sample Sources

Our sampled articles are sourced by our editor(s), who quite often surf through Web of Science/Scopus-indexed business journals; other sources include articles referred to by public/academics, popped up on social media, pointed by critical analysts, etc.

Our Quality Control Methods

Since we are challenging the flawed outcomes of the traditional peer review system, it is irrational to dive into the same system. Another reason to leave the traditional peer review system is the difficulty in finding highly professional and experienced critics. Instead, we adopt the concepts of "expert reviews" and "authority figures" to exercise the quality control for our published stories.

Our Identities

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. Plutarcha, famous Greek philosopher and historian, said, "To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future." In our experience, most people threaten the critics and desire to shut down scholarly criticism outlets. Based on these problems, our editor(s) want to focus on their work instead of being indulged in useless debates and litigations. Therefore, we decided to protect the identities of our editors and critical analysts. However, if authors, researchers, editors, and publishers want to get themselves trained on various research, publishing, and ethical topics, we connect them with experts and authority figures in the related areas of interest.

Our readers are invited to leave comments and suggestions for improvements.