INFORMS Open Forum

Dear Colleagues -- 

We need your help.  INFORMS publications continue to lead in many management-related areas that involve analytics. Our 17 academic journals continue to grow. However, this growth comes with the challenge of maintaining high ethical standards in publishing.

Although most authors act in good faith, the academic environment is increasingly shaped by systemic pressures that can distort incentives.
"Publish or perish" dynamics tied to tenure, promotion or grant success can create an overwhelming incentive to maximize publication count. 
These pressures, combined with gaps in training or ambiguous standards across disciplines, can lead some authors – knowingly or otherwise – to engage in misconduct such as duplicate submissions, data manipulation, or insufficient citation of related work.

Matt Walls and I just published this piece in OR/MS today. We propose that "self-regulation" within the INFORMS community can be a powerful and necessary tool to enforce ethical behavior and curb misconduct by a small subset of authors.  See: https://pubsonline.informs.org/do/10.1287/orms.2025.02.06/full/

Let's work together to protect the reputation of our organization, and ensure that the science we contribute to is worthy of its purpose: to inform, to improve and to inspire.

Thank you,

Chris Tang

(VP Pubs, INFORMS) 

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Christopher Tang
Distinguished Professor
ucla
Los Angeles CA
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Thank you for the article Chris -- this is indeed a crucial topic for our discipline. 

I support these efforts, and would add that they are aided by the replicability studies that have been done and are ongoing.  

Best,

Alan

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Alan Scheller-Wolf
Professor
Tepper School of Business
Pittsburgh PA
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Thanks, Chris, for taking the time to write the article. Building a positive reputation for a discipline takes years, but it takes discovering only a few high-profile ethical violations to destroy that reputation. 

Let me add one practical step for faculty who advise student research: We need to explicitly tell our students what ethical behavior is and that we personally value it, rather than assuming they absorb it by proximity to us. I find that refereeing a paper jointly with a student provides one great opportunity for such discussion, and addressing negative results in a research project provides another. I was fortunate that Bruce Schmeiser did both with me. 

 

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Barry Nelson
Walter P. Murphy Professor
Northwestern University
Evanston IL
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