“The issue of how to conduct high quality academic research in business and management studies continues to exercise the minds of many of us in this community. There seems to be little convergence of views as to how research should be conducted, with new ideas and new approaches being continually added.”

So wrote Professor Dan Remenyi in the preface to the proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Research Methodology for Business and Management studies, held in April this year at Reading University. Regular readers will know that this journal started as an offshoot of the conference in 2002, to provide a means to promulgate current thinking and work in this diverse field.

This issue of the journal contains 11 of the 41 papers presented at the 2004 conference These papers were nominated for publication in the journal by delegates and session chairs at the conference. In addition, a paper is included which formed the basis for a panel discussion. We also publish the first submission to a new book/conference review section, contributions for this area are invited at any time.

The selected papers demonstrate a wide variety of approaches to conducting and evaluating research and present ideas on research paradigms, philosophical pluralism, historiography, the Glaserian approach, Online focus groups and grounded theory. The “soft” issues are also addressed with papers on how to choose a research topic and how to help student’s assess the validity of their research. We hope that the papers published in this issue will open discussion and add to the body of knowledge, supporting further debate and future work.

We welcome suggestions for topical issues and encourage submissions of interesting empirical, theoretical or critical work. We are also pleased to receive case studies, reports on action research was well as reports on work in progress. Submission guidelines, calls for papers and publication schedules can all be found elsewhere on the website. Your comments are especially welcome.