Abstract

The recent announcement of the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) to cease journal accreditation operations as of the end of the year 2014 can easily influence the future of many research journals in Korea. Although this plan has not yet been formalized or structured, its facilitation would be the major turning point for the current Korean research and scholarly journals and publications. In addition, the NRF's plan to select and fund top 20 or more research journals over the five year period beginning 2015 suggests that the competition will most likely increase among Korean journals. Each journal would need to develop its unique strategy to improve and strengthen its competitiveness to become or maintain its position as a major research journal in Korea. The association of Korean Distribution of Science (KODISA) and its research journal, Journal of Distribution Science (JDS), has been continuously improving its reputation as a reputable journal in the distribution and related fields since its establishment in 1999. Due to demand, JDS has had to undergo several changes in its publication cycle first from semiannual publication to quarterly, then finally to monthly publications in 2012, and has become one of the major social science journals in Korea. Furthermore, with the redesigning of its webpage with English language in July of 2011, KODISA has made the published journals freely accessible and available to both domestic and foreign researchers, scholars, practitioners, and learners. These changes have resulted in the rapid increase in the bounce rate and the number of journal submissions by foreign scholars, with four research articles having been submitted by foreign scholars just in March of 2012 alone. However, although the changes and outcomes have resulted in a reasonable success so far, the achievement may only become a short-term success without continuously developing, improving, and implementing both effective and efficient strategies through critical, thorough, and frequent examinations and evaluations of both KODISA and JDS. As such, the purpose of this research is to carefully examine both KODISA and JDS to identify problematic factors and to develop appropriate strategies to change or modify those problems for further strengthening and improving their reputation and status. The paper examines and analyzes the past, present, and future of KODISA and JDS and their managerial, operational, and systematic procedures and operations. The narrow scope of research and inefficiencies in promoting the association and the journal and the improvement of impact factors are identified as the notable problems that could hinder JDS from being included in SCOPUS or SSCI in the near future. This type of examination and exploration has not been previously conducted, so the major limitation of this paper can be identified as not meticulously elaborating on the problems nor proving detailed recommendations based on the existing researches. This article asserted that solving the problem of the narrow scope of research would lead to facilitation of resolving other inefficient problems. Inclusion of international academic disciplines to the distribution and their related fields would be the viable initiation of expanding the research area, and this strategy could promote the journal as well as improve its impact factors. The narrow scope of research seems to be a good research topic and merit further exploration as an individual research project, because this kind of research could yield the creation of new understandings or theories.