| Founded | 1967 |
|---|---|
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Headquarters location | Bradford, West Yorkshire, England |
| Key people | John Peters; CEO, Martin Fojt; Chairman |
| Publication types | Journals |
| Nonfiction topics | management and business |
| Number of employees | 180+ |
| Official website | www.emeraldinsight.com |
Emerald Group Publishing Limited is a primary publisher of management and business journals. Founded in the UK in 1967, it operates worldwide with offices in Malaysia, Japan, China, India and the United States.
Contents |
Emerald was formed in 1967 as Management Consultants Bradford (MCB) by a group of academics dissatisfied by the publishing outlets of the time.[1] It acquired its first journal, Management Decision (originally the British Journal of Management), the following year for £1.[2] Fifty academics from the University of Bradford Management Centre each paid £100 for a share in the company in 1969 to allow the company to buy a building on Keighley Road, Bradford, West Yorkshire. The first employee was hired in 1970.[2] Individual journals were managed as separate companies and MCB became a "service company" for the journal companies. In 1977 it was decided that the individual journal companies would be merged into one company, MCB Publications Ltd.[2]
By 1981 the company had grown to 20 employees and was publishing 15 journals. From 1982 through 1997 the company was the official publisher for an independent action learning business school (International Management Centres). The year also saw the acquisition of Anbar which later became Emerald Reviews. By 1990 it was publishing 65 journals.[2] MCB was renamed Emerald in 2001.[2]
In 1992 Floppy Anbar (CD-ROM) was launched becoming the first product to be offered in an electronic format. This was accompanied by Literati, a database and network of authors and editors which was the first of its kind in terms of building and nurturing relationships. In 1994, the company began publishing some of its journals as the Electronic Management Research Library Database (EMERALD) on CD-ROM. Emerald Fulltext journals become available in 1995, rebranded as Emerald Management Xtra in 2004. Emerald launched the ManagementFirst website in 2000 (it later became Emerald ManagementFirst in 2007), aimed at corporate customers. In 2006 Emerald announced a partnership with iParadigms, the developers of the Turnitin anti-plagiarism detection product.[3]
In 2007 Emerald acquired a programme of Management and Social Science book serials, series and monographs from Elsevier. The acquisition of almost 2,000 book titles was a significant move for a publishing company that previously focused on journals.
In 2007 Emerald signed an agreement with the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), which covered 339 universities throughout Germany. Emerald works with over 60 consortia; an estimated 6,000 institutions worldwide now subscribe to their publications.[4]
Thirty-six of their journals are currently included in Journal Citation Reports. The company continues to grow through the acquisition of new journals and the development of new products. In 2008 it is hoped that a digital archive will be released featuring the full Emerald collection dating back to 1899. The earliest recorded article comes from the British Food Journal, and the collection is expected to feature some interesting content such as articles from Internet Research (1991), the first journal on record of the internet age, and believed to contain the first reference to the term ‘world wide web’ in a landmark exploratory paper by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
The company is based in Howard House on the outskirts of Bingley, West Yorkshire.
In 2004, Philip Davis of Cornell University found extensive covert duplication of articles in Emerald/MCB University Press journals, including at least 409 examples of articles from sixty-seven journals that were republished without notification that they were previously published. He found examples of triplicate publishing, as well as journals that contained no original content, but were filled with articles submitted to other journals.[5] He published a follow-up article reporting that the owners of Emerald were simultaneously acting as authors, editors, and managers of these journals, duplicating not only the work of others but their own as well.[6] Emerald undertook its own study and identified 560 republished papers from 1989 to 2004, 1.1 percent of its total database. Davis argued that "whatever the number, no amount of premeditated covert article duplication is acceptable".[7]
Notable writers for Emerald publications include Edmund Phelps who in 2006 won Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2006 ‘For his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy’. Phelps wrote "A Review of Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market" in the Journal of Economic Studies in 1993.[8]
Malaysian universities are mostly notable for top user of Emerald database.
Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) has received an award winning from Emerald Group Publishing Limited for using more Emerald articles other than 300 customers of registered universities worldwide.[9] The university holds a top downloader of articles for two consecutive years. Students and staffs, mostly are lecturers, from UiTM have downloaded over 870,000 articles from the Emerald research articles collection in business management and social sciences, securing as the highest user until 2010.
Second top user is Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) and the third is Monash University.[10]