Dear colleagues and friends,
As summer vacation comes to an end, I cannot help but reflect on the progress the journal has made over the last few years and in particular, since the beginning of the pandemic.
Journal Statistics and Impact: The number of new submissions in the first two quarters of 2021, including both Regular and Fast Track papers, increased by 13% relative to the same period last year and it is projected to cross the 4,300-submission line this year. The largest percentage increase is for Behavioral Economics and Decision Analysis, Business Strategy, Healthcare Management, and Revenue Management and Market Analytics.
Authors benefit from relatively short cycle times. Indeed, the median time to first decision is 78 days, far shorter than in previous years. Equally important, the median time from submission to final decision decreased dramatically. Whereas it was 150 days in 2018, it is now 87 days.
The journal impact factor has also moved in the right direction. The 2-year impact factor increased from 3.935 in 2019 to 4.883 in 2020. Unfortunately, comparing 2020 data to 2019 isn't straightforward given that beginning this year, Web of Science bases its calculation on online publication date rather than print publication date.
Recently, Google Scholar released its 2021 Scholar Metrics. According to Google Scholar, Management Science has an h5-index of 103 and an h5-median of 145. These two metrics count citation for papers published in the last five complete calendar years. To put this in perspective, the Table below provides the metrics for all 24 journals on the University of Texas Dallas' Naveen Jindal School of Management List of Journals. As you can see, Management Science is ranked very high on this list.
Publication of Management Science 65th Anniversary Special Issue: On May 20th and 21st, 2019, we celebrated the publication of the 65th volume of the journal during a conference at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. About 100 people attended the event, which highlighted plenary and invited speakers across all areas of interest to the journal. Beyond the great talks of many speakers, including luminaries such as Patrick T. Harker (President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia), Rebecca M. Henderson (Harvard Business School), Wallace J. Hopp (Ross School of Business, University of Michigan), Thomas L. Magnanti (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Nobel Laureate Alvin E. Roth (Professor of Economics at Stanford University), we had an opportunity for reflection on the journal's past, present and future.
The first twelve papers of the 2021 September issue are based on talks given during the event. These papers allow the conference speakers to provide their own perspectives on the various disciplines covered by the journal.
Out of the twelve papers in this special issue, about half study the evolution of research and suggest future directions in at least one of the various fields represented in the journal. Specifically, Chen, Cramton, List, and Ockenfels focused on research in market design and behavioral economics; Magnanti on research in linear, integer and combinatorial optimization; Dyer and Smith on research in decision analysis; Graves on operations management; Lobel on revenue management; Argote, Lee and Park on organizational learning processes and outcomes; and Rajgopal on the ability of accounting research to help address applied problems.
Other papers deal with various issues of interest to the management science community such as operational issues important in the design of successful kidney exchange programs (Ashlagi and Roth); understanding the process of innovation given today's societal and environmental challenges (Henderson); the relationship between social network structure and organizational properties (Jacobs and Watts); and the tradeoffs entrepreneurs face when testing the value of their ideas and the efficacy of their strategic choices (Agrawal, Gans, and Stern).
Finally, the special issue opening paper by Hopp and Simchi-Levi examines how well Management Science has performed against its primary goal to promote development and encourage application of a science of management. The paper highlights recent trends that are impacting this mission and discuss how recent initiatives address these issues.
The editorial board is proud to offer this special issue to the management science community. We recognize that like all special issues, this would not be possible without the hard work and efforts of many people including associate editors, referees, and the support of Toni Riley, the journal's managing editor.
New Department Editors: In the first eight months of the year, we appointed a few new editorial board members to fill vacancies left by retiring members or to extend the coverage of a department. The incoming editors are Vivek Farias (MIT) for Big Data Analytics; David Sraer (Berkeley) for Finance; Raphael Thomadsen (Washington University in St. Louis) for Marketing; Karan Girotra, (Cornell) and Elena Katok (University of Texas at Dallas) for Operations Management; and Itai Ashlagi (Stanford) for Revenue Management and Market Analytics. I would like to thank the departing editors- Hamid Nazerzadeh, Matthew Shum, Vishal Gaur, and Gabriel Weintraub-for all their contributions to the management science community and welcome the new editors.
David Simchi-Levi
Editor-in-Chief
Management Science
E-mail: mseic@mit.edu
Table: Google Scholar Metric for Journals on the UTD-List
|
Journal
|
h5-index
|
h5-median
|
|
Journal of Financial Economics
|
116
|
189
|
|
The Review of Financial Studies
|
108
|
157
|
|
Management Science
|
103
|
145
|
|
Journal of Finance
|
99
|
182
|
|
Strategic Management Journal
|
96
|
140
|
|
Academy of Management Journal
|
90
|
132
|
|
MIS Quarterly
|
72
|
106
|
|
The Accounting Review
|
72
|
112
|
|
Academy of Management Review
|
66
|
119
|
|
Journal of International Business Studies
|
66
|
104
|
|
Journal of Consumer Research
|
64
|
102
|
|
Journal of Accounting and Economics
|
63
|
98
|
|
Journal of Marketing
|
63
|
120
|
|
Journal of Marketing Research
|
56
|
88
|
|
Operations Research
|
56
|
78
|
|
Organization Science
|
54
|
84
|
|
Administrative Science Quarterly
|
52
|
97
|
|
Information Systems Research
|
50
|
78
|
|
Journal of Accounting Research
|
50
|
107
|
|
Marketing Science
|
50
|
84
|
|
Production and Operations Management
|
50
|
70
|
|
Journal of Operations Management
|
47
|
74
|
|
Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
|
47
|
70
|
|
Journal on Computing
|
30
|
48
|
Data Source: Google Scholar Blog: 2021 Scholar Metrics Released (googleblog.com)
------------------------------
David Simchi-Levi
Professor of Engineering Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge MA
------------------------------