Recent progress in the development of the Journal of Business Economics

In 2021 there were 263 manuscripts under review; 218 of them were finally decided. During the peer review process, submitted manuscripts go through one or more revision stages leading up to acceptance or rejection. Figure 1 summarizes the activity for the journal office between January 1st and December 31st of each year. The rejection rate for a year is calculated as the number of rejected manuscripts in this year compared to the total number of decisions in this year, which is defined here as the number of rejected manuscripts plus the number of accepted manuscripts.


Editorial status report
In 2021 there were 263 manuscripts under review; 218 of them were finally decided.
During the peer review process, submitted manuscripts go through one or more revision stages leading up to acceptance or rejection. Figure 1 summarizes the activity for the journal office between January 1st and December 31st of each year. The rejection rate for a year is calculated as the number of rejected manuscripts in this year compared to the total number of decisions in this year, which is defined here as the number of rejected manuscripts plus the number of accepted manuscripts.

Downloads in 2013-2021
Downloads of full-text articles are a very good indicator of the interest of the scientific community in the papers of the journal and their content. This concerns in a positive way two aspects simultaneously: the relevance of the topics as well as the quality of the articles. As can be seen by Figure 2, we had already about 60.000 downloads in 2013, in the first year after "Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft" had been transformed into the "Journal of Business Economics". In 2021, the downloads increased to over 280.500. Some of the illustrated growth in downloads over the years is due to the greater availability of articles via open access.
In addition, Table 1 gives an information about which articles, published in the years 2013-2021, were downloaded most frequently in the year 2021. 1 3

Best paper award 2021
By decision of the editors of the Journal of Business Economics the Best Paper Award 2021 is given to Christian Hackober and Carolin Bock for their contribution "Which investors' characteristics are beneficial for initial coin offerings? Evidence from blockchain technology-based firms", printed version in issue 8/2021. By this the editors like to prize a qualitatively outstanding publication. The editors and the publisher cordially congratulate the authors on this award.
Christian Hackober was born on May 7, 1988 in Bad Mergentheim, Germany. After graduating from the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) with a Master's degree in Business Engineering, he started his professional career at one of the world's leading consulting firms in the strategy and transaction advisory division. In 2017, he joined the Institute of Entrepreneurship of Prof. Dr. Carolin Bock as a doctoral candidate at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and received his PhD in 2021. His main research interests are in the area of innovative funding sources for startups and collaborations between incumbent firms and startups. Furthermore, he conducted research on influencing factors for valuation levels of startup firms.
Carolin Bock was born on February 28th, 1982 in Lichtenfels, Germany. She studied International Business Administration at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and at the Ecole de Management de Lyon. She received her doctoral degree from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2009, before she started working as a Post-Doc at the Chair in Entrepreneurial Finance at Technische Universität München. Since 2015, she is a professor of Entrepreneurship at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Her main research areas focus on questions of funding entrepreneurial firms, technology transfer and academic spin-offs as well as entrepreneurial activities in times of crisis.

Closing words
The Journal of Business Economics has experienced a remarkable development of the number of paper submissions and download figures since 2017. The editors and the publisher would like to conclude this editorial by expressing their warmest gratitude to all authors, readers, and reviewers of our journal who have made possible this success. We are looking forward to the years to come! Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Declarations
Conflict of interest None of the authors has any potential conflict of interest.
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