Rejected from Organization Science? The 7 Best Journals to Submit Next

Source: Clarivate JCR 2024, journal author guidelines and society pages (accessed June 2026). Impact-factor figures are rounded and vary by reporting source.

1. Administrative Science Quarterly. ASQ is the closest thing to a peer of Organization Science for deep theory-building work, so this is a lateral move rather than a step down. It rewards papers that develop or extend theory carefully and tolerates a slow, developmental review. Choose it when the rejection was about fit or framing, not about the strength of the theoretical move itself.

2. Academy of Management Journal. AMJ is the natural home when your contribution is genuinely empirical but grounded in theory. Where Organization Science wants the theoretical move front and center, AMJ accepts strong empirical work whose theory is solid without being the whole point. It runs a developmental, multi-round process.

3. Academy of Management Review. If your paper has no empirics and the contribution is a conceptual model or a new theoretical lens, AMR is the right venue and Organization Science was arguably never the fit. AMR publishes theory papers exclusively, so a conceptual manuscript that struggled against Organization Science's mixed empirical-theoretical bar often lands cleanly here.

4. Strategic Management Journal. Reach for SMJ when the real question is firm strategy, competitive advantage, or performance rather than organizing as such. A paper that an Organization Science editor reads as "this is really a strategy paper" usually fits SMJ's scope better and faces reviewers who share its priorities.

5. Journal of Management. JOM is the broad-management option that absorbs strong empirical organization and behavior work that fell between AMJ and a specialty journal. Its scope is wide, so a well-executed empirical paper with a respectable theory section has room here that a narrower venue would not give it.

6. Management Science (Organizations department). This is the in-house INFORMS sibling, and its Organizations department fits quantitative or analytical organization research, model-driven or large-sample empirical, better than prose-heavy theory. Choose it when the methods are the strength and the analysis carries the contribution.

7. Research Policy. When the manuscript's true center of gravity is innovation, technology adoption, or the organization of R&D, Research Policy frames that contribution well and reviewers expect it. An innovation-organization paper that read as off-center at Organization Science can be on-center here.

Organization Science does not run a portfolio transfer or cascade service. INFORMS will not auto-refer your rejected paper to Management Science, and there is no cross-publisher pipeline to ASQ, AMJ, or SMJ. That changes the playbook: where an Elsevier or Springer Nature rejection often comes with a one-click transfer offer, an Organization Science rejection hands the routing decision entirely to you. The upside is control; the cost is that a careless next choice wastes another full review cycle, and at these journals a cycle is measured in months.

Build the ladder by rejection reason rather than by prestige, because every journal on this list is a top-tier venue and stepping "down" is not really the move:

• Desk-rejected for fit or a weak contribution statement? Do not resend the same framing to the next first-choice journal. The fit problem follows the paper. Pick the venue whose scope actually matches the work: ASQ for theory, SMJ for strategy, Research Policy for innovation, AMR if there are no empirics.

• Rejected for an insufficient theoretical contribution, but sound empirics? This is the rebuild case, not a quick re-route.

Strengthen the theoretical move first, then target AMJ or Journal of Management, where strong empirics grounded in solid theory have a real path.

• Rejected after one or more developmental rounds? Carry the reviewers' best points into the next submission rather than discarding them. A revision that genuinely advances the theory is what failed to land in time at Organization Science; it is also what the next senior editor will look for.

In our pre-submission review work with Organization Science manuscripts, the rejections we see most often cluster into four named rejection patterns. Each one maps to a specific editorial expectation at this journal, and each is testable against your own manuscript, which is what makes them worth checking before you resubmit anywhere.

Insufficient theoretical contribution. Across our Organization Science pre-submission reviews, the single most common reason a manuscript stalls is a contribution statement that restates the findings instead of staking a theoretical claim. The abstract and the introduction describe what the study did and what it found, but never say what the field now knows about organizing that it did not know before.

Organization Science weights the theoretical advance above the empirical execution, so a paper can have clean methods and still read as under-theorized. This is testable: open your contribution statement and your introduction and ask whether a reader could state your theoretical claim in one sentence without referring to your results. If the only answer is "we found that," the theory is too thin.

Phenomenon without theory. A second recurring pattern in the Organization Science manuscripts we review is a paper built around a striking setting or a novel dataset, with the theory bolted on in the discussion rather than driving the design. The methods and results are strong, the topic is timely, but the theoretical framing reads as an afterthought. Senior editors at this journal screen specifically for whether theory motivated the study or was reverse-engineered onto it.

The fix is to lead with the theoretical puzzle in the introduction and let the phenomenon serve the theory, not the other way around. Check whether your hypotheses or research questions follow from a stated theoretical tension or simply describe the setting.

Wrong organization-theory venue. We see manuscripts whose true center of gravity is strategy, innovation, or pure conceptual theory, submitted to Organization Science because it is prestigious rather than because it fits. A firm-performance paper belongs at Strategic Management Journal; an R&D-organization paper belongs at Research Policy; a model with no empirics belongs at Academy of Management Review. The editorial question is not "is this good work?" but "is organizing the protagonist?"

Read your own abstract and ask whether the contribution is about how organizations organize, or about strategy, innovation, or an abstract model. If it is the latter, the right move is a different journal, not a resubmission with cosmetic edits.

Did not survive developmental review. The fourth pattern shows up later in the process. The paper clears the desk and enters Organization Science's multi-round developmental review, but the revision does not move the theory far enough between rounds and the manuscript is rejected at round two or three. Reviewers asked for a deeper theoretical contribution and the revision delivered more robustness checks and a longer literature review instead.

The lesson for the next submission is concrete: when reviewers say "develop the theory," they rarely mean "add controls." Carry the unmet theoretical ask into your next venue and answer it head-on, because the methods and statistical results were usually not the problem.

Don't just resubmit the same file to the next top journal. The fastest way to collect a second rejection is to send an unrevised manuscript to a journal that screens for the same thing Organization Science did, and some manuscripts need real work, not a faster next submission. A desk rejection for fit is a routing problem you can fix by choosing the right journal and rewriting the contribution statement to that journal's bar.

A rejection for an insufficient theoretical contribution is a substance problem, and the same concern will reappear at any top organization-theory venue. Be honest about which one you got.

Two cases call for real work before resubmitting, not a faster next submission. First, if reviewers said the theoretical contribution was thin, the manuscript needs a rebuilt theory section and a sharper contribution statement, not more robustness checks. Second, if the paper was read as a phenomenon without theory, the introduction needs to be re-led from a theoretical tension.

Appealing is rarely worth it: a contribution or fit rejection is an editorial judgment, not a factual error, and at journals with multi-month review queues a clean resubmission to a better-fit journal beats the appeal queue almost every time.