Improving Data Availability: A New SMJ Initiative

• Author: Sendil K. Ethiraj,Alfonso Gambardella,Constance E. Helfat
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2690

Strategic Management Journal

Strat. Mgmt. J.,38: 2145–2146 (2017)

Published online EarlyView 11 September 2017 in WileyOnline Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/smj.2690

Received 11 August 2017

EDITORIAL

Improving Data Availability: A New SMJ Initiative

Sendil K. Ethiraj,1Alfonso Gambardella,2and Constance E. Helfat3,*

1London Business School, London, U.K.

2Department of Management & Technology, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

3Strategy and Management Group, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, Hanover,

New Hampshire

In the pages of this journal, the coeditors have

previously written about the importance of

cumulative research, including the benets of

replication studies (Bettis, Ethiraj, Gambardella,

Helfat, & Mitchell, 2016; Ethiraj, Gambardella,

& Helfat, 2016). It goes without saying that the

availability of data facilitates the replication of

prior studies, including exact replications as well

as quasi-replications that use different data than

the original studies. However, data availability

in strategic management, and in the management

elds more generally, has other important benets

in promoting the cumulativeness of research-based

knowledge. In the eld of strategic management,

researchers often go to great lengths to collect

unique data that form the backbone of much of

our research. Scholars who wish to build on prior

research generally lack access to these sorts of

previously collected data, and therefore have to

reinvent the wheel (so to speak) by collecting new,

and often qualitatively different, data. This impedes

the cumulativeness of our research. In an effort to

improve matters, we are introducing a new SMJ

initiative that seeks to improve the availability of

data used in prior research while still providing

incentives for researchers to collect these data in

the rst place.

There are many ways to improve the availabil-

ity of data. A number of journals in economics

*Correspondence to: Constance E. Helfat, Tuck School of Busi-

ness at Dartmouth, 100 Tuck Hall, Hanover, NH 03755. E-mail:

constance.helfat@dartmouth.edu

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

and political science require that authors of empir-

ical work submit their data and code at the time

of article publication or paper submission, with

exemptions granted for proprietary and legally

restricted data (Christensen & Miguel, 2017). Com-

pelling the disclosure of data, however, can impede

research progress by reducing incentives for schol-

ars to collect and organize unique data in the rst

place (Christensen & Miguel, 2017). We believe

that this problem is especially relevant to strate-

gic management, where many studies rely on data

specic to individual rms, industries, and geo-

graphic areas. Some of these data are proprietary

or legally restricted, but even for data that are not,

researchers often spend an extensive amount of time

collecting data (especially data that is not easily

available from large electronic data bases), orga-

nizing it, and cleaning it to identify and correct

errors.

Given the amount of work involved in creating a

usable dataset, authors often plan a program of more

than one research paper from a dataset. Compelling

the disclosure of data would make it more difcult

to execute such research programs because other

researchers would have ready access to the same

data, and authors who collected the data in question

would risk being “scooped.” One solution to this

problem might be to place an embargo on access

to the data by other researchers for a specied

period of time. However, the appropriate amount

of time during which the original authors should

have exclusive access to their data is unclear, and

crafting such policies can result in complex and