Dear Colleagues -
Due to the support of our community (authors, reviewers, and editorial board members), the journal of M&SOM has continued to improve. Since we launched the general two-round policy in January 2015, we have observed more paper submissions, shorter review cycle time, and fewer review cycles. At the same time, the impact factor, 5-year impact factor, and article influence score of M&SOM have continued to increase. Finally, in July 2016, we received the great news that Financial Times decided to include M&SOM on the FT 50 journal list beginning January 2017.
While M&SOM is embraced by OM scholars around the world, there is another “golden opportunity” for M&SOM to be more accessible to OM scholars and scholars from other disciplines (e.g., marketing, economics, healthcare, public policy, etc.) who do not subscribe/read M&SOM articles. Because the public has free access to the abstracts of M&SOMarticles, we should urge authors to prepare abstracts that are “self-contained and understandable” by OM scholars and scholars from other disciplines. If more scholars can understand the essence of M&SOM articles by reading the abstracts, it can help them to appreciate OM research, to cite M&SOM articles, to build a larger intellectual community, etc.
To elaborate, consider the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) that had an Impact factor of 37.6 in 2015. The abstract of each JAMA “original investigation” article is a one-page self-contained document without technical jargon. Specifically, it is based on eight different subsections: (a) Importance; (b) Objective; (c) Design; (d) Setting and Participants; (e) Exposures; (f) Main Outcomes and Measures; (g) Results; and (h) Conclusions and Relevance.
This observation has motivated me to work with our editorial board to improve the accessibility of M&SOM articles to a larger set of scholars.
The following paper submission requirement will be effective on January 1, 2017. Each submitted article to M&SOMshould contain an abstract (no more than 300 words) that is based on the following subsections (without technical jargon):
(1) Problem definition: What is your research problem?
(2) Academic / Practical Relevance: How is your research problem relevant to the OM research / practice community?
(3) Methodology: What is the underlying research method?
(4) Results: What are your key findings?
(5) Managerial Implications: How can academics / managers / decision makers benefit from your study?
This new abstract requirement is a small change, but it can have a big effect on the accessibility and reachability of our journal. Please help us to make M&SOM more impactful so that our OM research community will continue to thrive!
I plan to explain this further during the MSOM society business meeting on Nov 13 at 6:15 pm. Also, I look forward to learning of you improvement ideas for M&SOM at INFORMS Nashville.
Thank you,
Chris Tang.
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Christopher Tang
Professor
University of California-Los Angeles
Los Angeles CA
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