Each year Emerald Group Publishing awards certificates to highly cited papers relating to the areas of Business Management, Finance, Accounting, Economics and Marketing – subjects in which Emerald itself has proudly published journals for 50 years. The selection process made by our own editorial experts is based initially on the citations being given to papers published in a previous year (in this case 2014), but our judging panel also take into account the content of the papers themselves in terms of novelty, inter-disciplinary interest and relevancy in today’s world. While high academic and research standards are a pre-requisite, these selections are of course ultimately subjective, but they are also a reflection of the high quality of work published in 2014.