Dear IACM members,

Greetings from Pennsylvania, USA! I am Qi Wang, the incoming Editor of NCMR. While Michael and I are in the transition of editorship from September to December 2019, I am excited to meet you all via SiGNAL. In the following sections, I introduce myself and the incoming editorial team, a thought about NCMR’s today and future, how you can help, and most contributing articles to our journal’s impact factor.

 

Editor: About Me

I obtained my doctoral degree from the University of Maryland in 2006, under the supervision of Dr. Deborah A. Cai and Dr. Edward L. Fink, award winning scholars and internationally known researchers in cross-cultural communication research and conflict management. With their guidance, my dissertation on conflict avoidance won the Outstanding Dissertation Award from IACM. I am currently Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Villanova University. In the past decade, I have collaborated with a team of public relations scholars and practitioners and have conducted conflict management research mainly in intercultural public relations contexts. I specifically examined the links between cultural factors, intercultural communication competence, and conflict management in both public relations practitioners and local community members. In addition, we have conducted a series of studies on promoting healthcare issues among minority and immigrant groups through strategizing non-profit healthcare organizations that work for these communities.

I will briefly describe one study here to let you know a bit more about my research program. With a grant from the Arthur Page Center from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014-2015, we conducted a study that examined how the public relations practices of multinational companies in mining industry had affected their relationships with local communities in Peru. We collected data from both local community members and multinational mining companies in Cajamarca and analyzed different public relations practices and conflict management strategies. This and other research studies that my collaborators and I did led to the publication of the 2018 book, Intercultural public relations: Theories for managing relationships and conflicts with strategic publics. The publisher, Routledge, has signed a contract with us to publish a second book, in which we will serve as editors and collect practitioners’ case studies that demonstrate the theoretical perspectives written in the first book.

I have assumed various service positions in my department, college, and the larger research community. When I was a graduate student, I worked as the student member at large at International Communication Association (ICA). At Villanova University, I have served as the area coordinator in interpersonal communication, chair of quantitative research methods, departmental assessment liaison with the university, college curriculum committee, and university election and credentials committee. In the Association for the Chinese Communication Scholars (ACCS) at National Communication Association (NCA), I served as newsletter editor, secretary, and President. During my presidency, I helped ACCS revise bylaws and establish it formally as a non-profit organization. I also helped establish a yahoo group and designed the formal ACCS logo. Today, ACCS has over 500 subscribers in the Chinese WeChat group under the new leadership and is collaborating with Chinese Communication Association (CCA). I will be more than happy to introduce NCMR and IACM to these associations, to attract more submissions and to increase the visibility of NCMR and IACM.

If you want to know more about me, please visit my brief bio at https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/artsci/communication/faculty/biodetail.html?mail=q.wang@villanova.edu&xsl=bio_long.

 

Editorial Team

Lan Ni (Ph.D. in communication from the University of Maryland) is an Associate Professor in the Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston. Dr. Ni’s research focuses on intercultural public relations, understanding and segmentation of publics, relationship management, conflict man­agement, and community engagement. Her recent work examines how public relations in intercultural settings can both benefit organizations and empower publics, especially immigrants and minority groups. Dr. Ni has been awarded multiple research grants from national and local agencies, published numerous journal articles and a theory book on intercultural public relations, and received many awards from various conferences and associations. She currently serves as the Associate Editor of Journal of Public Relations Research. Please visit Dr. Ni’s website at https://www.uh.edu/class/communication/our-team/faculty/ni-lan/ for more details.

Jimena Ramirez is Associate Professor of International Negotiation at IESEG School of Management (France). Her main research goal is understanding the influence of culture on the expectations, the use of strategy, and negotiation outcomes. She has worked with samples from Qatar, Spain, China, France, and the U.S. She is part of an international research team focusing particularly in honor culture. She is currently academic director of the Master in International Business at IESEG. Both of them are excellent authors and reviewers. I feel deeply honored to have them on board.

Last but not least, Alicia Utecht is the journal’s Editorial Assistant and is a first-year MA student in the Department of Communication at Villanova University. She is a stellar student and specializes in performance studies, with strong research interests in the intersections between disability studies, family communication, and identity. As an undergrad, she had two performances accepted to top performance panels in the Performance Studies Division at the National Communication Association conference, presenting one as an undergrad in her senior year and the second as a first-semester Master’s student.

 

NCMR, Today and Future

NCMR’s first volume was published in 2008. Over the past decade, its reputation and influence have risen rapidly:

NCMR 2-year Impact Factor = 1.189
NCMR 5-year Impact Factor = 1.352.

The trajectory of the impact factor (IF) indicates a steady increase since receiving its first impact factor in 2014 (IF = 0.763). *

NCMR’s rank has kept increasing in management and applied psychology fields. It is cited most frequently by top journals such as Cross Cultural & Strategic Management (IF = 2.619), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (IF = 2.908), Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF = 3.291), and Psychological Bulletin (IF = 16.405). *

The majority of NCMR articles in the 2018 Impact Factor period were cited 1-3 times. NCMR’s output is growing at a rate of 4.4% per year. The geographic distribution of NCMR authors has diversified in recent years too, with an increasing number of authors from Africa, the Middle East, Australasia, and Asia. During the 2018 Impact Factor period, 42.1% of articles were products of international collaboration. The regional distribution of citations of NCMR come from international readers, comparable to its competitors including Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Organizational Dynamics, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Negotiation Journal, Group Decision and Negotiation, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Journal of Applied Psychology. *

As for my vision for NCMR, our primary mission will be to continue increasing the growth in submissions while preserving the journal’s impressive impact factor. Because the impact factor, as the name implies, comes from articles with high impact, it is important to attract researchers who care about how negotiation and conflict management can help improve human conditions, in various levels and contexts, be it interpersonal, organizational, gendered, political, or cultural. In the February 2019 issue, our outgoing Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Michael Gross and the editorial team published a highly valuable article that analyzed demographic information of the authors and contents of articles in NCMR’s first decade. Within the first decade, 12 special issues were published. The topics included gender, negotiation skills, mediating skills, political violence, etc. The contents of the publications included negotiation (36%), conflict (13%), culture (9%), emotion (9%), gender (8%), mediation (8%), conflict management (8%), and other topics; the contents of the most cited articles overlapped with these categories as well. Among the authors, 70% were assistant professors and above and 10% were doctoral students. A good number of submitters were outside of the US and from Europe, Middle East, South and East Asia, and Americas. These data indicate that the journal attracts the exact authors for whom NCMR was designed. Therefore, I hope you and I will keep promoting our journal among the researchers in the conferences already identified, keep the current incentive for the Best Article Award, and perhaps create a student or an early-career Best Article Award, so that the future productive authors—current doctoral students and young scholars—are even more motivated to submit.

 

How You Can Help

I’d like to work with you all to keep NCMR flourish. The editorial board members, post-hoc reviewers, authors, and our larger research community have been doing an incredible job to keep up the quality of NCMR. Each one of you can help NCMR grow while you conduct your research. First, please continue citing NCMR. Citing articles from 2-5 most recent years contribute most to improving the impact factor.  We ask the IACM membership to take a look at the journal and cite articles relevant to your current research at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17504716.  Second, we ask that you submit your quality work to NCMR, the better manuscripts we receive the better articles we have to publish that will be cited and make an impact. We can’t encourage you enough to cite and submit research to our journal. Third, please help provide high-quality reviews. No matter you are on the board or are invited as a post-hoc reviewer, we depend on your expertise to publish the best quality articles that contribute to our field and benefit the general public. I will also invite excellent reviewers to the editorial board throughout my editorship.

Fourth, I find that the most cited articles from our competitor journals are about meta-analysis, research methods, approaches, and comprehensive reviews. (These competitor journals include Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Organizational Dynamics, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Negotiation Journal, Group Decision and Negotiation, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Journal of Applied Psychology. *) Therefore, I specially encourage the authors working on such topics prioritize your project and submit your finished work. You are welcome to email me with any questions.

Last but not least, please consider submitting your work or inviting your respected colleagues to submit their work if it is related to our current call for papers for two special issues. The first is on Global Conflict and Local Resolution, and the second is on Negotiation and Conflict Management in Public Relations and Strategic Communication.  The two calls are also available on NCMR’s homepage at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17504716. I am working on a third CFP for a special issue that will focus on helping relieve political polarizations global-wise from a conflict management perspective. Stay tuned.

I look forward to working with you all to serve NCMR. In every step, let’s help NCMR grow and continue being a source that shed light on problematic situations that can rely on the conflict management and negotiation research. Thank you!

The following two tables indicate the most cited NCMR articles in the last two years (Table 1) and the most cited articles in 2018 (Table 2).

 

Table 1: Top Cited NCMR Articles—2 Years Cite*

This Table shows the top cited papers in NCMR by 2-year citations (i.e. the number of cites received in the 2 years after publication).

Note: The data marked with an asterisk (*) come from the 2018 Citation Analysis Report provided by NCMR’s publisher, Wiley.