Before describing our taxonomy in more detail, it
is important to note two of its limitations. First, as
with any taxonomy, ours can be accused of collapsing
meaningful distinctions in the interest of parsimony.
After all, taxonomies—like theories—are attempts
to eliminate some of the complexity found
in the real world (Bacharach, 1989). Our intention
was not to capture every nuance of theory building
and theory testing, but rather to create a tool that
could be used to chart trends in theoretical contributions
over time. Second, Figure 1 only captures
what empirical articles are intended to do—it does
not capture how well they actually do it. One could
conceive of a third axis that captures how interesting
a new construct is, how much a new relationship
adds to a literature, how rigorously a theory is
tested, or the degree to which the mere writing of a
paper makes a contribution in and of itself, apart
from the actual findings presented. These sorts of
issues are clearly critical to the quality of an article’s
theoretical contribution and are likely to be
significant predictors of scholarly impact. Unfortunately,
coding such issues requires an in-depth
content expertise that is lacking in a journalwide
review of this type.