Submit a case for the Catalogue

Generally speaking, the authors who submit teaching material to the Catalogue are management professors working in institutions of higher education. However, the Centre is also open to submissions from authors who are not part of this category (graduate students, college professors, etc.).

When you submit your cases or other teaching tools, you are sharing this pedagogical material with other management teaching professionals. By submitting your cases to the HEC Montréal Case Centre Catalogue, you are ensured of the rapid dissemination of your teaching documents.

Case studies account for the majority of teaching material listed in the Catalogue. Some are accompanied by teaching notes, others are not. These case studies can be decision-making or analytical cases, and they may use a traditional, text-based approach or a multimedia approach (photos, audio, video, web site, etc.). Other teaching tools that are consistent with the pedagogical principles underlying the case method are also welcome, including industry notes, critical incidents, simulations, role-playing, etc.

To be admissible, your case (or other teaching tool) must meet the following criteria:

• Your material has not already been published elsewhere or listed in the catalogue of another case centre.
• If applicable, you must have obtained publication authorization from the company or individuals appearing in the case (see below).
• You have followed the submission guidelines available on the web site.
• You are not in a conflict of interest with the protagonists in the case or with the company that is the focus of the teaching documents.
• You have obtained the necessary authorizations for the use of excerpts from previously published material (ex.: text, tables, images) and provided these authorizations to the Case Centre.
• You have ensured the linguistic quality of the documents.

• Documents must be submitted in Microsoft Word format.
• The first page of the document is a cover page containing the following information:
  • Title of the document;
  • First name, LAST NAME, email address and affiliation (title and teaching institution) of each author.
• The text must be clear and well written and must comply with standards of linguistic quality. The English used must follow the rules of grammar and spelling. Several resources are available for reference, including The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing by Dundurn Press in cooperation with Public Works, Government Services Canada Translation Bureau, and the web site at the following address: http://www.btb.gc.ca/btb.php?lang=eng&cont=041. Common errors include too many or too few commas; improper punctuation with closing quotation marks; improper use of capitalization; tenses in conditional sentences; use of a hyphen after an adverb ending in -ly (ex. a carefully planned project, not a carefully-planned project), etc. If you are in doubt, it’s best to look it up!
• Use footnotes at the bottom of the page (rather than endnotes at the end of the document). Footnotes should be presented in ascending numerical order (1, 2, etc.) and their numbering should restart on each page.
• The document must be paginated. Appendices are numbered (Appendix 1, Appendix 2, etc.) and the page numbers of appendices continue the sequence in the main text..
• The following format applies to the bibliography, which is generally placed at the end of the document:
  • LAST NAME, First name and First Name LAST NAME (2002). “Title of the Article,” Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 2-22..
  • LAST NAME, First name and First Name LAST NAME (2009). Title of the Book, Place of Publication, Publisher’s name, 34 pages.
    • For more information on how to format bibliographic references, we invite you to consult Presentation of References, Quotations and Bibliographic Entries, available online at http://www.hec.ca/qualitecomm/caf/bibliography.pdf:

If it is an actual case based on data not in the public domain, you must obtain publication authorization from the company or individuals that provided the data. This authorization is required even for disguised and/or anonymized case studies, in which case you must specify the changes made to the data on the registration form (this information is available only to the Centre’s editorial team and will, of course, remain confidential).

Where the case is based on real data that is public and contains no potentially litigious material, publication authorization is not required. Similarly, if it is a fictional case or a case inspired by a real-life situation, but there is nothing in the information provided that allows a link to be made with an actual situation, publication authorization is not required.

Teaching notes are not mandatory. However, it has been shown that professors are more likely to use teaching material produced by others when that material is accompanied by teaching notes.

Moreover, even if you choose not to submit teaching notes, when filling out the registration form, you are required to specify the main teaching objectives addressed by the case as well as the principal concepts or theories to which the case refers.

See our Guide to Writing Teaching Notes.

When you submit documents to the Catalogue, you are required to sign an agreement transferring copyright to the HEC Montréal Case Centre.

As the author of the documents, however, you retain the right to use your material.