What Passes as a Transparent Field Study in Management?

In order to assess the rigor of research procedures (whether qualitative or quantitative), to appreciate a study’s results, and to want to integrate them into the body of scholarly knowledge, they need to be transparently relayed. Unlike in other disciplines or methods, it is far from clear what the label ‘transparent research procedures’ constitutes in management field studies, with adverse effects during write-up, revision, and even after publication. To rectify this, we review 365 field studies across seven major management journals 1997-2006 in order to develop a transparency index, and link it to article impact. Overall, transparency tends to increase impact across methods, particularly with increasing article age. Moreover, quantitative studies tend to be more transparent than qualitative studies, although key transparency indicators were underutilized in either method.