A slide presentation of this material has been well received in several countries. Presenting it here in paragraph form should be helpful to additional authors. The editorial explains the current flow path for incoming submissions to Technological Forecasting & Social Change. It details five areas authors should attend to, in order that their manuscripts should pass the Editor-in-Chief’s and Associate Editors’ preliminary approval, and be sent to external peer review. It concludes with a list of twenty common mistakes that would prevent a paper from going to peer-review.

Technological Forecasting & Social Change

Widely considered one of the top three technology management journals, TF&SC has an impact factor of about 3.1, making it an attractive target for authors. Indeed about two thousand manuscripts are submitted each year. 1.2 million TF&SC articles are downloaded every year, meaning that our articles are read, and have a good chance of being cited. We publish approximately 225 articles per year, implying an acceptance rate of about 12%. Many of the points made below are consequences of this low acceptance rate. The journal is concerned with the interaction of technological change with social/organizational change; problems of forecasting, adoption, diffusion, and implementation of new technologies; and new and improved methodologies for studying those problems. Within those frames, we feature strong ongoing streams in environmental sustainability, system theory, and innovation. Many arriving papers fall outside this scope, and I return them to authors with this notice: Technological Forecasting & Social Change is not a general innovation journal, strategy journal, entrepreneurship journal, or R&D journal. TFSC papers may “cross” one or more of these areas. TFSC papers must have an explicit technological focus and some measure of future-orientation. They must relate technological innovation(s) to social impacts, or extend the methodologies for doing so. Papers focusing on the profitability of individual companies are not of interest to Technological Forecasting & Social Change, although “social change” can sometimes be interpreted as organizational change. Technological Forecasting & Social Change seeks substantial and important (i.e., not incremental) research results.