The TQM Journal

Before you start

For queries relating to the status of your paper pre decision, please contact the Editor or Journal Editorial Office. For queries post acceptance, please contact the Supplier Project Manager. These details can be found in the Editorial Team section.

Author responsibilities

Our goal is to provide you with a professional and courteous experience at each stage of the review and publication process. There are also some responsibilities that sit with you as the author. Our expectation is that you will:

• Respond swiftly to any queries during the publication process.
• Be accountable for all aspects of your work. This includes investigating and resolving any questions about accuracy or research integrity.
• Treat communications between you and the journal editor as confidential until an editorial decision has been made.
• Read about our research ethics for authorship. These state that you must:
  • Include anyone who has made a substantial and meaningful contribution to the submission (anyone else involved in the paper should be listed in the acknowledgements).
  • Exclude anyone who hasn’t contributed to the paper, or who has chosen not to be associated with the research.
  • In accordance with COPE’s position statement on AI tools, Large Language Models cannot be credited with authorship as they are incapable of conceptualising a research design without human direction and cannot be accountable for the integrity, originality, and validity of the published work.
• If your article involves human participants, you must ensure you have considered whether or not you require ethical approval for your research, and include this information as part of your submission. Find out more about informed consent.

Research and publishing ethics

Our editors and employees work hard to ensure the content we publish is ethically sound. To help us achieve that goal, we closely follow the advice laid out in the guidelines and flowcharts on the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) website.

We have also developed our research and publishing ethics guidelines. If you haven’t already read these, we urge you to do so – they will help you avoid the most common publishing ethics issues.

A few key points:

• Any manuscript you submit to this journal should be original. That means it should not have been published before in its current, or similar, form. Exceptions to this rule are outlined in our pre-print and conference paper policies.  If any substantial element of your paper has been previously published, you need to declare this to the journal editor upon submission. Please note, the journal editor may use Crossref Similarity Check to check on the originality of submissions received. This service compares submissions against a database of 49 million works from 800 scholarly publishers.
• Your work should not have been submitted elsewhere and should not be under consideration by any other publication.
• If you have a conflict of interest, you must declare it upon submission; this allows the editor to decide how they would like to proceed. Read about conflict of interest in our research and publishing ethics guidelines.
• By submitting your work to Emerald, you are guaranteeing that the work is not in infringement of any existing copyright.

Third party copyright permissions

Prior to article submission, you need to ensure you’ve applied for, and received, written permission to use any material in your manuscript that has been created by a third party. Please note, we are unable to publish any article that still has permissions pending. The rights we require are:

• Non-exclusive rights to reproduce the material in the article or book chapter.
• Print and electronic rights.
• Worldwide English-language rights.
• To use the material for the life of the work. That means there should be no time restrictions on its re-use e.g. a one-year licence.

We are a member of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) and participate in the STM permissions guidelines, a reciprocal free exchange of material with other STM publishers.  In some cases, this may mean that you don’t need permission to re-use content. If so, please highlight this at the submission stage.

Please take a few moments to read our guide to publishing permissions to ensure you have met all the requirements, so that we can process your submission without delay.

Open access submissions and information

All our journals currently offer two open access (OA) publishing paths; gold open access and green open access.

If you would like to, or are required to, make the branded publisher PDF (also known as the version of record) freely available immediately upon publication, you can select the gold open access route once your paper is accepted. 

If you’ve chosen to publish gold open access, this is the point you will be asked to pay the APC (article processing charge). This varies per journal and can be found on our APC price list or on the editorial system at the point of submission. Your article will be published with a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 user licence, which outlines how readers can reuse your work.

Alternatively, if you would like to, or are required to, publish open access but your funding doesn’t cover the cost of the APC, you can choose the green open access, or self-archiving, route. As soon as your article is published, you can make the author accepted manuscript (the version accepted for publication) openly available, free from payment and embargo periods.

You can find out more about our open access routes, our APCs and waivers and read our FAQs on our open research page. 

Find out about open

Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines

We are a signatory of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, a framework that supports the reproducibility of research through the adoption of transparent research practices. That means we encourage you to:

• Cite and fully reference all data, program code, and other methods in your article.
• Include persistent identifiers, such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), in references for datasets and program codes. Persistent identifiers ensure future access to unique published digital objects, such as a piece of text or datasets. Persistent identifiers are assigned to datasets by digital archives, such as institutional repositories and partners in the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS).
• Follow appropriate international and national procedures with respect to data protection, rights to privacy and other ethical considerations, whenever you cite data. For further guidance please refer to our research and publishing ethics guidelines. For an example on how to cite datasets, please refer to the references section below.

Prepare your submission

Manuscript support services

We are pleased to partner with Editage, a platform that connects you with relevant experts in language support, translation, editing, visuals, consulting, and more. After you’ve agreed a fee, they will work with you to enhance your manuscript and get it submission-ready.

This is an optional service for authors who feel they need a little extra support. It does not guarantee your work will be accepted for review or publication.

Visit Editage

Manuscript requirements

Before you submit your manuscript, it’s important you read and follow the guidelines below. You will also find some useful tips in our structure your journal submission how-to guide.

Format

Article files should be provided in Microsoft Word format.

While you are welcome to submit a PDF of the document alongside the Word file, PDFs alone are not acceptable. LaTeX files can also be used but only if an accompanying PDF document is provided. Acceptable figure file types are listed further below.

Article length / word count

Articles should be between 5000  and 9000 words in length. This includes all text, for example, the structured abstract, references, all text in tables, and figures and appendices. 

Please allow 280 words for each figure or table.

Article title

A concisely worded title should be provided.

Author details

The names of all contributing authors should be added to the ScholarOne submission; please list them in the order in which you’d like them to be published. Each contributing author will need their own ScholarOne author account, from which we will extract the following details:

• Author email address (institutional preferred).
• Author name. We will reproduce it exactly, so any middle names and/or initials they want featured must be included.
• Author affiliation. This should be where they were based when the research for the paper was conducted.

In multi-authored papers, it’s important that ALL authors that have made a significant contribution to the paper are listed. Those who have provided support but have not contributed to the research should be featured in an acknowledgements section. You should never include people who have not contributed to the paper or who don’t want to be associated with the research. Read about our research ethics for authorship.

Biographies and acknowledgements

If you want to include these items, save them in a separate Microsoft Word document and upload the file with your submission. Where they are included, a brief professional biography of not more than 100 words should be supplied for each named author.

Research funding

Your article must reference all sources of external research funding in the acknowledgements section. You should describe the role of the funder or financial sponsor in the entire research process, from study design to submission.

Structured abstract

All submissions must include a structured abstract, following the format outlined below.

These four sub-headings and their accompanying explanations must always be included:

• Purpose
• Design/methodology/approach
• Findings
• Originality

The following three sub-headings are optional and can be included, if applicable:

• Research limitations/implications
• Practical implications
• Social implications

You can find some useful tips in our write an article abstract how-to guide.

The maximum length of your abstract should be 250 words in total, including keywords and article classification (see the sections below).

Keywords

Your submission should include up to 12 appropriate and short keywords that capture the principal topics of the paper. Our Creating an SEO-friendly manuscript how to guide contains some practical guidance on choosing search-engine friendly keywords.

Please note, while we will always try to use the keywords you’ve suggested, the in-house editorial team may replace some of them with matching terms to ensure consistency across publications and improve your article’s visibility.

Article classification

During the submission process, you will be asked to select a type for your paper; the options are listed below. If you don’t see an exact match, please choose the best fit:

• Research Paper
• Case Study
• Conceptual Paper
• Book Review

You will also be asked to select a category for your paper. The options for this are listed below. If you don’t see an exact match, please choose the best fit:

Research paper. Reports on any type of research undertaken by the author(s), including:

• The construction or testing of a model or framework
• Action research
• Testing of data, market research or surveys
• Empirical, scientific or clinical research
• Papers with a practical focus

Viewpoint. Covers any paper where content is dependent on the author’s opinion and interpretation. This includes journalistic and magazine-style pieces.

Technical paper. Describes and evaluates technical products, processes or services.

Conceptual paper. Focuses on developing hypotheses and is usually discursive. Covers philosophical discussions and comparative studies of other authors’ work and thinking.

Case study. Describes actual interventions or experiences within organizations. It can be subjective and doesn’t generally report on research. Also covers a description of a legal case or a hypothetical case study used as a teaching exercise.

Literature review. This category should only be used if the main purpose of the paper is to annotate and/or critique the literature in a particular field. It could be a selective bibliography providing advice on information sources, or the paper may aim to cover the main contributors to the development of a topic and explore their different views.

General review. Provides an overview or historical examination of some concept, technique or phenomenon. Papers are likely to be more descriptive or instructional (‘how to’ papers) than discursive.

Headings

Headings must be concise, with a clear indication of the required hierarchy. 

The preferred format is for first level headings to be in bold, and subsequent sub-headings to be in medium italics.

Notes/endnotes

Notes or endnotes should only be used if absolutely necessary. They should be identified in the text by consecutive numbers enclosed in square brackets. These numbers should then be listed, and explained, at the end of the article.

Figures

All figures (charts, diagrams, line drawings, webpages/screenshots, and photographic images) should be submitted electronically. Both colour and black and white files are accepted.

There are a few other important points to note:

• All figures should be supplied at the highest resolution/quality possible with numbers and text clearly legible.
• Acceptable formats are .ai, .eps, .jpeg, .bmp, and .tif.
• Electronic figures created in other applications should be supplied in their original formats and should also be either copied and pasted into a blank MS Word document, or submitted as a PDF file.
• All figures should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals and have clear captions.
• All photographs should be numbered as Plate 1, 2, 3, etc. and have clear captions.
• All figure/table captions should include the necessary credit line, acknowledgement, or attribution if you have been given permission to use the figure/table; if the figure/table is the property of the author(s), this should be acknowledged in the caption.

Tables

Tables should be typed and submitted in a separate file to the main body of the article. The position of each table should be clearly labelled in the main body of the article with corresponding labels clearly shown in the table file. Tables should be numbered consecutively in Roman numerals (e.g. I, II, etc.).

Give each table a brief title. Ensure that any superscripts or asterisks are shown next to the relevant items and have explanations displayed as footnotes to the table, figure or plate.

Supplementary files

Where tables, figures, appendices, and other additional content are supplementary to the article but not critical to the reader’s understanding of it, you can choose to host these supplementary files alongside your article on Insight, Emerald’s content hosting platform, or on an institutional or personal repository. All supplementary material must be submitted prior to acceptance.

If you choose to host your supplementary files on Insight, you must submit these as separate files alongside your article. Files should be clearly labelled in such a way that makes it clear they are supplementary; Emerald recommends that the file name is descriptive and that it follows the format ‘Supplementary_material_appendix_1’ or ‘Supplementary tables’. All supplementary material must be mentioned at the appropriate moment in the main text of the article, there is no need to include the content of the file but only the file name. A link to the supplementary material will be added to the article during production, and the material will be made available alongside the main text of the article at the point of EarlyCite publication.

Please note that Emerald will not make any changes to the material; it will not be copyedited, typeset, and authors will not receive proofs. Emerald therefore strongly recommends that you style all supplementary material ahead of acceptance of the article.

Emerald Insight can host the following file types and extensions:

• Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
• MS Word document (.doc, .docx)
• MS Excel (.xls, xlsx)
• MS PowerPoint (.pptx)
• Image (.png, .jpeg, .gif)
• Plain ASCII text (.txt)
• PostScript (.ps)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)

If you choose to use an institutional or personal repository, you should ensure that the supplementary material is hosted on the repository ahead of submission, and then include a link only to the repository within the article. It is the responsibility of the submitting author to ensure that the material is free to access and that it remains permanently available.

Please note that extensive supplementary material may be subject to peer review; this is at the discretion of the journal Editor and dependent on the content of the material (for example, whether including it would support the reviewer making a decision on the article during the peer review process).

References

All references in your manuscript must be formatted using one of the recognised Harvard styles. You are welcome to use the Harvard style Emerald has adopted – we’ve provided a detailed guide below. Want to use a different Harvard style? That’s fine, our typesetters will make any necessary changes to your manuscript if it is accepted. Please ensure you check all your citations for completeness, accuracy and consistency.

Emerald’s Harvard referencing style

References to other publications in your text should be written as follows:

• Single author: (Adams, 2006)
• Two authors: (Adams and Brown, 2006)
• Three or more authors: (Adams et al., 2006) Please note, ‘et al’ should always be written in italics.

A few other style points. These apply to both the main body of text and your final list of references.

• When referring to pages in a publication, use ‘p.(page number)’ for a single page or ‘pp.(page numbers)’ to indicate a page range.
• Page numbers should always be written out in full, e.g. 175-179, not 175-9.
• Where a colon or dash appears in the title of an article or book chapter, the letter that follows that colon or dash should always be lower case.
• When citing a work with multiple editors, use the abbreviation ‘Ed.s’.

At the end of your paper, please supply a reference list in alphabetical order using the style guidelines below. Where a DOI is available, this should be included at the end of the reference.

For books

Surname, initials (year), title of book, publisher, place of publication.

e.g. Harrow, R. (2005), No Place to Hide, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.

For book chapters

Surname, initials (year), “chapter title”, editor’s surname, initials (Ed.), title of book, publisher, place of publication, page numbers.

e.g. Calabrese, F.A. (2005), “The early pathways: theory to practice – a continuum”, Stankosky, M. (Ed.), Creating the Discipline of Knowledge Management, Elsevier, New York, NY, pp.15-20.

For journals

Surname, initials (year), “title of article”, journal name, volume issue, page numbers.

e.g. Capizzi, M.T. and Ferguson, R. (2005), “Loyalty trends for the twenty-first century”, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 22 No. 2, pp.72-80.

For published 
conference proceedings

Surname, initials (year of publication), “title of paper”, in editor’s surname, initials (Ed.), title of published proceeding which may include place and date(s) held, publisher, place of publication, page numbers.

e.g. Wilde, S. and Cox, C. (2008), “Principal factors contributing to the competitiveness of tourism destinations at varying stages of development”, in Richardson, S., Fredline, L., Patiar A., & Ternel, M. (Ed.s), CAUTHE 2008: Where the ‘bloody hell’ are we?, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Qld, pp.115-118.

For unpublished 
conference proceedings

Surname, initials (year), “title of paper”, paper presented at [name of conference], [date of conference], [place of conference], available at: URL if freely available on the internet (accessed date).

e.g. Aumueller, D. (2005), “Semantic authoring and retrieval within a wiki”, paper presented at the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), 29 May-1 June, Heraklion, Crete, available at: http://dbs.uni-leipzig.de/file/aumueller05wiksar.pdf (accessed 20 February 2007).

For working papers

Surname, initials (year), “title of article”, working paper [number if available], institution or organization, place of organization, date.

e.g. Moizer, P. (2003), “How published academic research can inform policy decisions: the case of mandatory rotation of audit appointments”, working paper, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, 28 March.

For encyclopaedia entries 
(with no author or editor)

Title of encyclopaedia (year), “title of entry”, volume, edition, title of encyclopaedia, publisher, place of publication, page numbers.

e.g. Encyclopaedia Britannica (1926), “Psychology of culture contact”, Vol. 1, 13th ed., Encyclopaedia Britannica, London and New York, NY, pp.765-771.

(for authored entries, please refer to book chapter guidelines above)

For newspaper 
articles (authored)

Surname, initials (year), “article title”, newspaper, date, page numbers.

e.g. Smith, A. (2008), “Money for old rope”, Daily News, 21 January, pp.1, 3-4.

For newspaper 
articles (non-authored)

Newspaper (year), “article title”, date, page numbers.

e.g. Daily News (2008), “Small change”, 2 February, p.7.

For archival or other unpublished sources

Surname, initials (year), “title of document”, unpublished manuscript, collection name, inventory record, name of archive, location of archive.

e.g. Litman, S. (1902), “Mechanism & Technique of Commerce”, unpublished manuscript, Simon Litman Papers, Record series 9/5/29 Box 3, University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign, IL.

For electronic sources

If available online, the full URL should be supplied at the end of the reference, as well as the date that the resource was accessed.

Surname, initials (year), “title of electronic source”, available at: persistent URL (accessed date month year).

e.g. Weida, S. and Stolley, K. (2013), “Developing strong thesis statements”, available at: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/588/1/ (accessed 20 June 2018)

Standalone URLs, i.e. those without an author or date, should be included either inside parentheses within the main text, or preferably set as a note (Roman numeral within square brackets within text followed by the full URL address at the end of the paper).

For data

Surname, initials (year), title of dataset, name of data repository, available at: persistent URL, (accessed date month year).

e.g. Campbell, A. and Kahn, R.L. (2015), American National Election Study, 1948, ICPSR07218-v4, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (distributor), Ann Arbor, MI, available at: https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07218.v4 (accessed 20 June 2018)

Submit your manuscript

There are a number of key steps you should follow to ensure a smooth and trouble-free submission.

Double check your manuscript

Before submitting your work, it is your responsibility to check that the manuscript is complete, grammatically correct, and without spelling or typographical errors. A few other important points:

• Give the journal aims and scope a final read. Is your manuscript definitely a good fit? If it isn’t, the editor may decline it without peer review.
• Does your manuscript comply with our research and publishing ethics guidelines?
• Have you cleared any necessary publishing permissions?
• Have you followed all the formatting requirements laid out in these author guidelines?
• Does the manuscript contain any information that might help the reviewer identify you? This could compromise the anonymous peer review process. A few tips:
  • If you need to refer to your own work, use wording such as ‘previous research has demonstrated’ not ‘our previous research has demonstrated’.
  • If you need to refer to your own, currently unpublished work, don’t include this work in the reference list.
  • Any acknowledgments or author biographies should be uploaded as separate files.
  • Carry out a final check to ensure that no author names appear anywhere in the manuscript. This includes in figures or captions.

You will find a helpful submission checklist on the website Think.Check.Submit.

The submission process

All manuscripts should be submitted through our editorial system by the corresponding author.

A separate author account is required for each journal you submit to. If this is your first time submitting to this journal, please choose the Create an account or Register now option in the editorial system. If you already have an Emerald login, you are welcome to reuse the existing username and password here.

Please note, the next time you log into the system, you will be asked for your username. This will be the email address you entered when you set up your account.

Don’t forget to add your ORCiD ID during the submission process. It will be embedded in your published article, along with a link to the ORCiD registry allowing others to easily match you with your work.

Don’t have one yet? It only takes a few moments to register for a free ORCiD identifier.

Visit the ScholarOne support centre for further help and guidance.

What you can expect next

You will receive an automated email from the journal editor, confirming your successful submission. It will provide you with a manuscript number, which will be used in all future correspondence about your submission. If you have any reason to suspect the confirmation email you receive might be fraudulent, please contact our Rights team on [email protected]

Post submission

Review and decision process

Each submission is checked by the editor. At this stage, they may choose to decline or unsubmit your manuscript if it doesn’t fit the journal aims and scope, or they feel the language/manuscript quality is too low.

If they think it might be suitable for the publication, they will send it to at least two independent referees for double anonymous peer review.  Once these reviewers have provided their feedback, the editor may decide to accept your manuscript, request minor or major revisions, or decline your work.

This journal offers an article transfer service. If the editor decides to decline your manuscript, either before or after peer review, they may offer to transfer it to a more relevant Emerald journal in this field. If you accept, your ScholarOne author account, and the accounts of your co-authors, will automatically transfer to the new journal, along with your manuscript and any accompanying peer review reports. However, you will still need to log in to ScholarOne to complete the submission process using your existing username and password. While accepting a transfer does not guarantee the receiving journal will publish your work, an editor will only suggest a transfer if they feel your article is a good fit with the new title.

While all journals work to different timescales, the goal is that the editor will inform you of their first decision within 60 days.

During this period, we will send you automated updates on the progress of your manuscript via our submission system, or you can log in to check on the current status of your paper.  Each time we contact you, we will quote the manuscript number you were given at the point of submission. If you receive an email that does not match these criteria, it could be fraudulent and we recommend you email [email protected]

If your submission is accepted

Open access

Once your paper is accepted, you will have the opportunity to indicate whether you would like to publish your paper via the gold open access route.

If you’ve chosen to publish gold open access, this is the point you will be asked to pay the APC (article processing charge).  This varies per journal and can be found on our APC price list or on the editorial system at the point of submission. Your article will be published with a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 user licence, which outlines how readers can reuse your work.

For UK journal article authors – if you wish to submit your work accepted by Emerald to REF 2021, you must make a ‘closed deposit’ of your accepted manuscript to your respective institutional repository upon acceptance of your article. Articles accepted for publication after 1st April 2018 should be deposited as soon as possible, but no later than three months after the acceptance date. For further information and guidance, please refer to the REF 2021 website.

Copyright

All accepted authors are sent an email with a link to a licence form.  This should be checked for accuracy, for example whether contact and affiliation details are up to date and your name is spelled correctly, and then returned to us electronically. If there is a reason why you can’t assign copyright to us, you should discuss this with your journal content editor. You will find their contact details on the editorial team section above.

Proofing and typesetting

Once we have received your completed licence form, the article will pass directly into the production process. We will carry out editorial checks, copyediting, and typesetting and then return proofs to you (if you are the corresponding author) for your review. This is your opportunity to correct any typographical errors, grammatical errors or incorrect author details. We can’t accept requests to rewrite texts at this stage.

When the page proofs are finalised, the fully typeset and proofed version of record is published online. This is referred to as the EarlyCite version. While an EarlyCite article has yet to be assigned to a volume or issue, it does have a digital object identifier (DOI) and is fully citable. It will be compiled into an issue according to the journal’s issue schedule, with papers being added by chronological date of publication.

How to share your paper

Visit our author rights page to find out how you can reuse and share your work.

To find tips on increasing the visibility of your published paper, read about how to promote your work.

Correcting inaccuracies in your published paper

Sometimes errors are made during the research, writing and publishing processes. When these issues arise, we have the option of withdrawing the paper or introducing a correction notice. Find out more about our article withdrawal and correction policies.

Need to make a change to the author list? See our frequently asked questions (FAQs) below.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a submission fee
for the journal?

The only time we will ever ask you for money to publish in an Emerald journal is if you have chosen to publish via the gold open access route. You will be asked to pay an APC (article processing charge) once your paper has been accepted (unless it is a sponsored open access journal). 

Read about our APCs

At no other time will you be asked to contribute financially towards your article’s publication. If you haven’t chosen gold open access and you receive an email which appears to be from Emerald, asking you for payment to publish, please contact our Rights team on [email protected]

How can I become
a reviewer for a journal?

Please contact the editor for the journal, with a copy of your CV. You will find their contact details on the editorial team tab on this page.

Who do I contact if I want to find out which volume and issue my accepted paper will appear in?

Typically, papers are added to an issue according to their date of publication. If you would like to know in advance which issue your paper will appear in, please contact the content editor of the journal. You will find their contact details on the editorial team tab on this page. Once your paper has been published in an issue, you will be notified by email.

Who do I contact if I have
a query about my submission?

Please email the journal editor – you will find their contact details on the editorial team tab on this page. If you ever suspect an email you’ve received from Emerald might not be genuine, you are welcome to verify it with the content editor for the journal, whose contact details can be found on the editorial team tab on this page. Alternatively, you can email our Rights team.

Is my paper suitable
for the journal?

If you’ve read the aims and scope on the journal landing page and are still unsure whether your paper is suitable for the journal, please email the editor and include your paper’s title and structured abstract. They will be able to advise on your manuscript’s suitability. You will find their contact details on the Editorial team tab on this page.

How do I make a change to the list of authors once the manuscript has been submitted?

Authorship and the order in which the authors are listed on the paper should be agreed prior to submission. We have a right first time policy on this and no changes can be made to the list once submitted. If you have made an error in the submission process, please email the Journal Editorial Office who will look into your request – you will find their contact details on the editorial team tab on this page.