At the most recent Editorial Board meeting of the European Journal of Information Systems, we agreed to update the word limit guidance for authors submitting manuscripts to the journal. The new wording, as already updated on the EJIS website, reads as follows:
A typical paper for this journal should not exceed 10,000 words for the main text for first submission. This includes all tables and figures (which should be placed in the main text in the position where they are to appear in the finished article) but excludes references and appendices. The editors reserve the right to send a paper back to authors if it is unnecessarily long.
For those of you who have submitted manuscripts to EJIS previously, you will see that we are now allowing authors to submit slightly longer manuscripts than before. The previous guidance stated that a typical paper should be between 5000 and 8000 words (13,000 words for review articles), inclusive of the abstract, tables, references, figure captions, footnotes, endnotes.
There are a few reasons for making this change. First, we discovered that many first submissions are well over 8,000 words. Hence the limits were not being consistently enforced anyhow. Second, 8,000 words may not be sufficient for many qualitative papers. Third, having limits that are inconsistently enforced creates a submission landscape where those who don’t know the “rules of the game” are disadvantaged. Junior scholars, for example, might follow the rules only to find out later that they have not sufficiently explained their research. Senior scholars, by contrast, might exceed the recommended word limit, knowing that there will be few, if any, consequences for doing so. Hence, this can create an inconsistent review experience. Fourth, having a 10,000-word limit for the main text, but excluding references, means that the recommended limit of review articles is about the same as before.
Although we are increasing the EJIS word limit, please do not take this as an invitation to write poorly. EJIS reviewers and editors do not like waffle, nor do they like unnecessary repetition. Hence, I hope to continue receiving well-crafted papers with little repetition.
I am grateful to Crispin Coombs, one of our senior editors, for raising this issue at the recent board meeting.