Phenomenon-Driven Topic Selection (jibs-topic-selection)

When to trigger

• You have an idea or a dataset but are unsure it is a real international-business question
• Your sample is one country and you are not sure that qualifies as IB
• You can describe a finding but not the cross-border phenomenon behind it
• You are deciding between JIBS and an adjacent journal (AMJ, SMJ, JWB, GSJ, MIR)

The JIBS fit test

JIBS is distinctively phenomenon-based. Its Statement of Editorial Policy seeks "insightful and innovative" research on real-world international-business problems, and the journal explicitly discourages incremental extensions. Before anything else, your topic must pass four gates:

1. Phenomenon gate. Name a concrete cross-border, multi-country, or global phenomenon, problem, or puzzle (e.g., an MNE entry-mode choice, a subsidiary-HQ tension, a cross-cultural negotiation outcome, a de-globalization shock). If you can only name a "gap," you do not yet have a JIBS topic.
2. Level-of-analysis gate. JIBS treats country and culture as levels of analysis, not as control variables. State whether your effect lives at the individual, firm/subsidiary, or country level — and where the cross-level action is.
3. IB-theory gate. State what new thing the field learns about international business — internationalization, the MNE, cross-cultural management, international strategy/finance/economics, or global political economy. A general management insight that happens to use foreign data is not enough.
4. Cross-national-variation gate. Either your variation is cross-country, or you have a defensible reason a single-country study speaks to IB theory (e.g., it tests a boundary condition of an IB theory). Single-country convenience samples framed as "international" are a desk-reject risk.

Phenomenon stress test

A question that clears the four gates on paper can still collapse in review. Force it through five prompts before locking it:

1. Actors and border. Name who crosses (or is caught between) which borders — an MNE headquarters, a subsidiary, a migrant manager, a deal team. "Firms in a global economy" names nobody.
2. Whose puzzle. Identify the decision-maker for whom this is a live problem — an HQ choosing governance for a distant subsidiary, a policymaker weighing FDI screening. If no practitioner or policymaker is confused, the "phenomenon" may be a literature artifact.
3. Why now. Say what changed in the world (a de-globalization shock, a technology, a regulatory turn) that makes the question timely rather than timeless-generic.
4. Multidisciplinary reach. JIBS's editorial policy is explicitly multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary; a topic that genuinely needs more than one discipline's toolkit strengthens fit, provided the payoff still lands in IB theory.
5. Dataset-first honesty. If the true origin is "we have this cross-country dataset," run the gates in reverse: what phenomenon could this variation actually illuminate? A dataset-first start is fine privately; submitting one without a phenomenon is not.

Micro-rewrite. Before: "How does culture affect cross-border M&A performance?" — no actor, no puzzle, culture as a black box. After: "Why do acquirers with strong domestic integration records systematically underperform in high-institutional-distance hosts, despite paying for the same due diligence?" — a named anomaly, a specific actor, and a country-dyad-level condition doing the theoretical work.

Venue routing

• JIBS: the contribution is to IB theory; country/culture is theorized, not controlled; AIB's official journal.
• AMJ: strong general-management empirics + theory, often single-country — route here if the cross-border element is incidental.
• SMJ: competitive advantage/performance; route here if the question is strategy-first and not distinctively cross-border.
• JWB / MIR / GSJ: IB-adjacent; viable if the contribution is solid but narrower than JIBS's phenomenon bar.

Fit pass for Journal of International Business Studies

Use this as a second-pass capability check. First lock the cross-border mechanism, level of analysis, institutional context, and generalizability claim; then test whether the manuscript addresses international-business reviewers who expect cross-border theory, context sensitivity, and credible firm or institution evidence.

• Primary move: Score fit, novelty, evidence readiness, and audience ownership; reject prestige-only targeting when a sibling venue owns the contribution.
• Decision ledger: return claim / evidence / blocker / next edit rows so the next pass can patch the manuscript directly.
• Neighbor test: compare against Strategic Management Journal for strategy theory, Journal of Management for broader management, International Business Review for applied IB breadth; if the neighboring outlet has the stronger audience claim, recommend re-routing before polishing.
• Verification floor: before submission-ready advice, re-open resources/official-source-map.md for volatile rules and name the one unresolved fact that could change the recommendation.

Output format

【Phenomenon】the concrete cross-border puzzle ...
【Levels】individual / firm-subsidiary / country; cross-level action at ...
【IB-theory contribution】what the field learns about international business ...
【Variation】cross-country / justified single-country ...
【Fit verdict】JIBS / route to AMJ|SMJ|JWB because ...
【Next step】jibs-theory-development

Anti-patterns

• "Gap-spotting" ("no one has studied X in country Y") with no phenomenon or mechanism.
• Treating country as a dummy control rather than theorizing the country/culture level.
• "Foreign-data management paper" with no distinctively international mechanism.
• Over-claiming a single-country sample as cross-national.