Submissions & Reprints

Submission Guidelines

Thank you for your interest in contributing content to Ivey Business Journal. Our publication welcomes proposal letters offering original and exclusive content targeting a sophisticated audience of business professionals and academics in the form of IBJ Insights and feature articles on management issues. Please note that potential contributors must follow our submission guidelines, which require a pitch letter, even if pitching a completed work. Furthermore, due to the high volume of pitch letters that we receive, we can only respond to proposals with potential for publication. Please send a proposal letter that follows our submission guidelines to IBJsubmissions@ivey.ca.

IBJ Insights are concise commentaries (800–1,500 words) that offer unique observations or analysis of current events and market trends. Ideas presented must be clearly new or at least clearly offer a new way of looking at something of interest to our audience.

Feature articles are longer (2,000–5,000 words), delivering practitioner versions of academic articles, productivity-enhancing management advice or transformative ideas with practical applications based on significant C-suite experience or original research. Whenever possible, feature content should be supported by real-world examples. While we are open to publishing any article offering original and exclusive content of interest to our target audience, our focus is on the following topics:

  • Consumer Behaviour
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Governance
  • Leadership
  • Marketing
  • Strategy
  • Supply Chain
  • Sustainability
  • Technology/Social Media
  • International Business

When evaluating pitches, please keep in mind that we ask ourselves if potential contributors are authoritative and persuasive enough to provide our readers with an intellectual return on time invested. All pitch letters must include a short but detailed outline of proposed content, including a list of the key takeaways being offered to readers, along with the potential contributor’s bio, address, phone number, professional affiliations and email. Any relationship with subject organization(s) must be disclosed. Pitches should contain a statement that indicates that proposed content is original, unpublished and exclusively offered to IBJ, meaning it will not be offered to other publications unless IBJ declines to publish or fails to respond to a content pitch within one month. Potential contributors must also acknowledge that accepted IBJ content becomes the property of Ivey Publishing for reprint and distribution.

If a pitch is approved by our review committee, IBJ will contact the potential contributor and request a working draft that follows our writing guidelines. All content is edited for clarity and length, but all drafts must be well-structured with introductions that are engaging and quickly get to the point. Please note that a final decision to publish will be based on the quality of the working draft.

Proposed content should be submitted in Word format and follow Canadian Press (CP) on matters of style and the Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English on matters of spelling. Audience-limiting jargon should be kept to a minimum. If applicable, a brief research methodology section should be included. Graphs, tables and charts are acceptable, but only if they are required to advance an argument and provided as separate high-resolution files that can be edited. Third-party work and opinions must be clearly credited using endnotes that follow the following format:

ACADEMIC ARTICLE REFERENCE:
Author first initial author last name, “Article Title,” Name of Publication, date, issue number, page number (p. or pp.).

BOOK REFERENCES:
Author first name author last name, Book Title, edition number, publisher, place of publication, year of publication, page number (p. or pp.).

NEWSPAPER ARTICLE REFERENCES:
Author first name author last name, “Article Title,” Name of Newspaper, date, page (p. or pp.), column, section.

MAGAZINE ARTICLE REFERENCES:
Author, “Article Title,” Name of Magazine, date, page number (p. or pp.).

INTERNET REFERENCES:
Use the style as shown above when possible, and include the URL (the http address) and the date when it was accessed, including the month, day and year (e.g. “accessed March 21, 2013”). This reference is necessary due to the ever-changing nature of the Internet. The URL should not be underlined. Remove “http://” if it is followed by “www.”

Instead of op. cit., use last name, year and page.