Academy of Management Discoveries: Scopus, Scope & Submission Guide

Quick Answer: What Is Academy of Management Discoveries?

Academy of Management Discoveries is an Academy of Management journal for phenomenon-driven empirical exploration in management and organizations. The official mission emphasizes empirical patterns and phenomena that current theories do not adequately predict or explain, including work based on ethnographic observation, experiments, surveys, meta-analysis, construct validation, replication, and other rigorous empirical approaches.

AMD is currently published quarterly in March, June, September, and December. It is an online journal and is represented in the supplied Scopus source record under Source ID 21101146363. It also has current Clarivate journal metrics displayed by AOM. For authors, however, the most important screening question is not simply whether AMD is indexed or highly cited; it is whether the manuscript is genuinely exploratory and phenomenon-forward.

A researcher considering AMD should therefore verify four things before submission: that the phenomenon is compelling and insufficiently explained, that the empirical design is rigorous, that the manuscript does not depend on deductive hypothesis testing, and that the chosen submission type matches the current AMD guidelines.

Key Takeaways

• AMD is published by the Academy of Management and appears quarterly.
• The journal’s core mission is empirical exploration of poorly understood management and organizational phenomena.
• The supplied Scopus identifier is Source ID 21101146363; current database status should be rechecked before formal use.
• The ISSN International Centre lists ISSN 2168-1007 for the online journal.
• AOM displays 2025 Clarivate metrics of Impact Factor 4.8, five-year Impact Factor 6.2, and Article Influence Score 3.08.
• AMD explicitly distinguishes its papers from deductive, hypothesis-testing empirical work.
• Submission uses ScholarOne, with double-blind review and AOM/AMD formatting requirements.
• AOM currently describes green open access rather than Gold author-funded OA for its traditional journal program.

Journal Information at a Glance

The table below separates facts that are directly verifiable from values that should be checked in the live database at the point of submission.

Metrics can change each reporting cycle. The most defensible practice is to record both the metric year and the database used when citing a journal indicator.

What This Page Covers

• AMD’s journal identity, mission, aims and empirical philosophy
• Scopus source identification, ISSN and dated Clarivate metrics
• Research themes and methods that can fit the journal
• Submission categories and examples of strong or weak fit
• Manuscript formatting, anonymization, keywords and ScholarOne workflow
• Double-blind peer review, editorial screening and reviewer criteria
• Open-access and publication-fee information currently stated by AOM
• Publication ethics, AI-use expectations and author responsibilities
• A practical pre-submission checklist and ethical Contentxprtz support options

Methodology and Source Note

This profile was prepared from the current Academy of Management Discoveries journal page, the official AMD submission guidance, AOM’s open-access policy, the ISSN International Centre record, the supplied Scopus Source ID 21101146363, and AOM’s current editorial-team pages. Journal metrics, editorial roles, calls for papers, database coverage and policies can change, so researchers should re-check the official pages immediately before submission.

What Does AMD Actually Aim to Publish?

AMD aims to publish discoveries that emerge from rigorous empirical exploration of management and organizational phenomena that are not yet well explained by existing theory. The journal’s official wording repeatedly emphasizes the pre-theory stage of knowledge development: authors begin from a phenomenon or empirical puzzle, investigate it carefully, and use the resulting findings to suggest explanations and future theoretical directions.

This produces a distinctive paper architecture. Instead of a front end dominated by theory-derived hypotheses, an AMD manuscript should establish why the phenomenon is interesting, consequential, surprising, or poorly understood. The empirical work then needs to generate strong evidence for one or more discoveries. The discussion can propose plausible theoretical explanations, but the contribution grows out of what the data reveal rather than from confirming a pre-specified theoretical prediction.

AOM explicitly says AMD does not publish articles that test hypotheses or are deductively framed in their empiricism, nor papers motivated solely by theoretical argument. That exclusion is one of the clearest journal-fit filters available to prospective authors.

Research approaches that can be compatible

The official journal description allows data from many sources, including ethnographic observations, laboratory and field experiments, field surveys, meta-analyses, construct-validation research and replication studies. Method choice is therefore less important than the logic of inquiry: the study needs to explore a phenomenon and produce a persuasive empirical discovery.

Representative areas that may fit

Based on the journal’s management-and-organizations scope, potentially relevant topics can include organizational behavior, leadership, teams, diversity, identity, careers and work, human resource practices, entrepreneurship, innovation, strategy, organizational learning, institutions, technology and organizations, governance, interorganizational relationships, responsible management and organizational responses to social or economic change. These are guidance examples, not an official exhaustive topic list.

Understanding Its Scopus Coverage and Journal Metrics

The supplied source row identifies AMD as a Scopus journal under Source ID 21101146363. That identifier is useful because journal titles can be similar, renamed, or duplicated across indexing services. Researchers can use the source ID to navigate directly to the Scopus profile and verify current coverage, subject classifications, CiteScore, percentile, quartile, SJR and SNIP.

This guide does not freeze third-party Scopus metrics into the page when a current official Scopus profile could not be independently rendered in the research environment. That is intentional: the article brief requires current, defensible values rather than estimates. Scopus itself advises users to cite metric name, year and source context.

For Clarivate indicators, the official AOM journal page currently displays Impact Factor 4.8, five-year Impact Factor 6.2 and Article Influence Score 3.08, labelled © Clarivate 2025. These values provide one view of citation performance; they should not substitute for manuscript-scope fit, readership, institutional requirements or the quality of the editorial process.

How to interpret quartiles responsibly

If your university requires a particular Scopus quartile, check the current category-specific value in Scopus. A journal can sit in more than one subject category, and quartiles are category- and year-dependent. Avoid describing AMD simply as “Q1” or “Q2” without identifying the reporting year and relevant category.

Publisher, Frequency and Editorial Leadership

Academy of Management Discoveries is published by the Academy of Management and appears quarterly in March, June, September and December. The ISSN International Centre records it as an online United States serial with ISSN 2168-1007.

Editorial leadership is in a transition period in 2026. AOM’s editorial-team page lists Prithviraj Chattopadhyay and C. Chet Miller as editors within the current team, while AOM separately announced Erik Ian Dane as the incoming editor and stated that the new AMD team would begin receiving manuscript submissions on 1 July 2026. Because the current date falls after that handover point, authors should check the live AMD editorial page and ScholarOne information rather than relying on an older cached name.

The wider team includes deputy and associate editors across organizational behavior, strategy, innovation, leadership and related management areas. For manuscript preparation, the practical point is not to target an individual editor but to ensure that the paper clearly demonstrates the phenomenon, discovery, rigor and contribution expected by the journal.

What Types of Papers Does AMD Publish?

AOM currently lists several AMD submission or publication formats. The categories are not interchangeable, and some have special rules.

• Traditional Papers: the main full-length empirical format; AOM indicates that these are typically about 15–40 pages excluding references, tables, figures and appendices.
• Discoveries-through-Prose: nontraditional, engaging narratives that retain empirical rigor while using a more magazine-feature-like voice and structure.
• Registered Reports: introduction, methods, measurement information and analysis plan are evaluated before results; this format is particularly suited to questions where null or unexpected findings can still be theoretically important.
• Spotlights: targeted formats or special research initiatives announced by AMD; authors should consult the specific call.
• Guideposts: short invited pieces from distinguished senior scholars identifying phenomena or anomalies that deserve empirical exploration.
• Commentaries: commentary content associated with the journal’s conversations and published work.

Recent AMD content also illustrates the journal’s range—from organizational behavior and work phenomena to responsible management, innovation and methodological reflection—while preserving the journal’s central phenomenon-forward logic.

Is This Journal a Good Match for Your Research?

AMD is a strong potential fit when the manuscript begins with an important empirical puzzle and needs exploration more than hypothesis confirmation. A useful pre-submission test is to ask whether removing the hypotheses would weaken the paper or actually make its discovery logic clearer. If the whole paper depends on confirming theory-driven predictions, another management journal may be a more natural target.

Journal-fit checklist

• Is the phenomenon compelling, underexplored or poorly explained?
• Can you show why current theory is insufficient without manufacturing a fake “gap”?
• Does the empirical design produce a discovery rather than merely test a prediction?
• Are the methods rigorous enough to make the surprising result persuasive?
• Would management and organization scholars care about the phenomenon?
• Does the paper offer plausible explanations and future theoretical pathways?
• Have you compared the manuscript with recent AMD papers using similar methods?
• Are you submitting under the correct AMD paper type?

Preparing and Submitting a Manuscript

The official AMD instructions are unusually concrete. A manuscript that ignores the journal’s presentation and anonymization rules can be returned without review, so formatting is part of publication readiness rather than a cosmetic final step.

Core manuscript requirements currently stated by AOM

• Follow the AOM Style Guide for Authors and AMD-specific guidance.
• Prepare an abstract of no more than 200 words that briefly describes the discovery and its implications for management knowledge and practice.
• Use double spacing, one-inch margins and 12-point Times New Roman.
• Prepare a Word file with the title page and author-identifying references removed for blind review.
• Provide three keywords in the ScholarOne submission workflow.
• Answer all submission questions and place acknowledgements in the cover-letter area rather than the blinded manuscript.
• Upload the main document and any appropriate supplementary files through ScholarOne.

AMD also requires authors to affirm that the manuscript is not simultaneously under review elsewhere and has not previously been submitted to AMD, and to disclose overlapping data use as required. Papers previously presented at conferences or published in AOM Annual Meeting Proceedings may be acceptable under the stated rules.

Submission workflow

1. Read the latest AMD journal page, author instructions and reviewer template.
2. Select the correct paper type.
3. Prepare the blinded manuscript and required supporting files.
4. Create or use a ScholarOne account at the AMD submission site.
5. Enter type, title and abstract.
6. Add three keywords, authors and institutions.
7. Complete declarations, comments and cover-letter information.
8. Upload manuscript and supplementary files.
9. Review every field for accuracy and submit.

The official AMD ScholarOne portal should be used for the live submission process.

What Happens After You Submit?

AMD uses double-blind peer review and a journal-specific reviewer template based on its mission. In practice, manuscripts first face editorial and technical screening. Papers that do not match the phenomenon-forward remit, are poorly presented, or fail key requirements may be rejected before full external review.

For papers that proceed, reviewers are asked to assess the significance of the discovery, the degree to which existing theory fails to explain the phenomenon, the rigor and persuasiveness of the empirical evidence, the accessibility of the writing and the paper’s potential to stimulate future theorizing. Revisions should therefore respond not only to technical comments but also to the central editorial question: what has genuinely been discovered, and why should management scholars care?

AMD’s Registered Reports have additional process guidance. AOM states that editors strive to make a publication decision after one round of double-blind review for that format, while the Associate Editor retains discretion over revision and acceptance. That statement should not be generalized to every AMD paper type.

Acceptance rate and review time

The official sources reviewed for this article do not provide a general AMD acceptance rate or a single average peer-review duration. This guide therefore does not estimate either figure. Actual timelines can depend on editorial screening, reviewer availability, manuscript complexity and revision cycles.

Open Access, Copyright and Publication Fees

AOM’s current policy describes green open access for its traditional journal program. Authors may self-archive versions of their work under specified conditions, and the policy states that complete open access to the finalized Version of Record in an institutional repository can occur after a 12-month embargo.

The same AOM page says that the organization currently does not support Gold, author-funded open access for this program. It also describes a CC BY-NC-ND user-license framework in its open-access guidance. Because rights and access rules can depend on article version and repository type, authors should read the live policy before depositing a manuscript.

The AMD pages reviewed for this guide do not state a standard Gold OA APC. Therefore, no APC figure is presented here. Authors should verify the current publishing and fee policy immediately before submission rather than relying on third-party fee directories.

Publication Ethics and AOM’s AI Policy

Submitting to AMD means agreeing to the Academy of Management’s publication requirements and Code of Ethical Conduct. The AMD submission guidance specifically prohibits simultaneous submission and requires transparent handling of overlapping data. More broadly, responsible publication includes accurate authorship, honest reporting, appropriate citation, disclosure of conflicts and funding, and compliance with human-participant or other research-ethics requirements where relevant.

AOM also states an AI policy for submitted work: manuscripts must be created by the authors and not be the product of AI tools unless AI use is appropriate to the research question and properly cited. Authors must disclose AI use in the cover letter and article acknowledgements and remain responsible for the submitted content. That policy should be checked again at submission because publisher rules for generative AI continue to evolve.

Professional editing can improve language, structure and compliance, but it should never fabricate data, invent citations, conceal authorship, or replace the researcher’s intellectual responsibility.

Practical Journal-Fit Examples

Example 1 — Strong phenomenon-forward match

A management scholar discovers a repeated workplace pattern across organizations that established theories do not explain and uses multiple field studies to investigate it. If the paper clearly establishes the puzzle, uses rigorous methods and develops plausible post-discovery explanations, AMD may be a strong candidate.

Example 2 — Strong methods, wrong logic

A large dataset is used to test twelve preregistered hypotheses derived from a mature theory. The statistics may be excellent, but the project is fundamentally deductive. Based on AMD’s stated mission, the author should consider a journal whose editorial model welcomes theory-testing research.

Example 3 — Replication with a genuine discovery

A replication finds that a widely accepted management effect disappears in an important organizational context. AMD explicitly welcomes replications when they reveal empirical patterns that challenge assumptions and open new theoretical paths. The paper would still need to demonstrate rigor and why the boundary condition matters.

Example 4 — First-time author with a good discovery but weak presentation

The study fits AMD, but the abstract is too long, the manuscript is not blinded, and the discussion does not explain what the surprising evidence contributes. Before submission, the author should correct the AOM formatting, sharpen the discovery narrative and ensure that the paper is accessible to AMD’s broad readership.

Example 5 — Major revision

An author receives a revise-and-resubmit decision asking for clearer evidence and a stronger explanation of the phenomenon. A good response letter should reproduce each comment, answer it point by point, identify the exact revision location and explain respectfully when a suggestion is not adopted. The revised manuscript and response letter must tell the same story.

Pre-Submission Checklist for AMD

• Confirm the current AMD aims and scope on the official journal page.
• Verify Scopus Source ID 21101146363 and current coverage in Scopus Sources.
• Check the latest Clarivate metrics only if they matter to your institutional decision.
• Choose the correct AMD submission type.
• Confirm that the paper is phenomenon-forward rather than deductive hypothesis testing.
• Read several recent AMD papers using a comparable empirical approach.
• Keep the abstract within the current 200-word limit.
• Use double spacing, one-inch margins and 12-point Times New Roman.
• Remove author names, title page and identifying references from the blinded file.
• Prepare the three required keywords.
• Check figures, tables, appendices and supplementary files.
• Confirm data, ethics, funding, conflict and authorship declarations.
• Disclose AI use as required by the current AOM policy.
• Ensure the manuscript is not under review elsewhere.
• Prepare a concise cover letter explaining fit without overselling the paper.
• Proofread the final blinded manuscript and ScholarOne metadata.
• Verify current open-access and sharing rules.
• Ensure every coauthor has approved the submission.

How Contentxprtz Can Support Authors Preparing for AMD

Preparing for Academy of Management Discoveries often requires more than correcting grammar. The manuscript has to communicate an empirical puzzle clearly, maintain a phenomenon-forward narrative, present rigorous evidence, follow AOM formatting and remain accessible to a broad management readership.

Contentxprtz can support authors with journal-scope alignment review, manuscript assessment, academic editing, proofreading, ESL language polishing, title and abstract refinement, journal formatting, reference consistency, cover-letter editing and reviewer-response editing. Researchers can also explore journal publication services when they need structured publication-readiness support.

Contentxprtz does not control editorial decisions and does not guarantee acceptance or publication. The purpose of professional support is to help authors present their own research more clearly, accurately, ethically and in line with the journal’s applicable requirements.

Summary: Academy of Management Discoveries

Academy of Management Discoveries is a quarterly Academy of Management journal for rigorous exploratory empirical research on management and organizational phenomena that existing theory does not adequately explain. Its supplied Scopus Source ID is 21101146363, and the ISSN International Centre lists ISSN 2168-1007. AOM currently displays 2025 Clarivate metrics of 4.8 Impact Factor, 6.2 five-year Impact Factor and 3.08 Article Influence Score.

For prospective authors, the decisive issue is fit. AMD is built around phenomenon-forward discovery, not conventional deductive hypothesis testing. Manuscripts should be methodologically strong, narratively clear, accessible to the journal’s wide management readership and prepared according to AOM/AMD submission rules. Because indexing, metrics, editorial teams and policies change, final verification should always occur on the official AOM, Scopus and submission pages immediately before submission.

Conclusion: Should You Consider Academy of Management Discoveries?

Academy of Management Discoveries is worth considering when your manuscript investigates a consequential management or organizational phenomenon that is not well explained by existing theory and the empirical work produces a credible discovery. Before submitting, verify the current Scopus profile, author instructions, editorial information and access policy, then align the manuscript closely with AMD’s phenomenon-forward logic. Professional editing can strengthen clarity and compliance, but journal selection and acceptance ultimately depend on the research, the manuscript’s fit and the journal’s independent editorial process.