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Individual Journal Guidelines
- Decision Analysis
- Information Systems Research
- INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics
- INFORMS Journal on Computing
- INFORMS Journal on Data Science
- INFORMS Journal on Optimization
- Management Science
- Marketing Science
- Mathematics of Operations Research
- Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
- Operations Research
- Organization Science
- Service Science
- Stochastic Systems
- Strategy Science
- Transportaton Science
General Submission Guidelines
Authors are encouraged to follow these general submission guidelines to improve their review experience.
- Think carefully about what the appropriate outlet is for your paper. Not every paper is suitable to Operations Research, Management Science, and/or Manufacturing & Service Operations Management despite the fact that some institutions only count publications in these journals. Carefully read the editorial statements of the journals to be sure your paper is a fit for the journal. If it is not, it is likely to be rejected (hopefully quickly but that is not always the case). Such papers add to the editorial burden of our journals and introduce delays in getting your work out to the research community.
- Read a number of papers in the journal to which you are submitting your work. If the style of your paper is completely different from the style of all papers published in the journal, chances are the journal is not a good outlet for your research. For example, if the journal never publishes purely empirical research and your entire study is based on a survey you conducted, you should probably not submit the paper to that journal. Similarly, if your paper is a qualitative study of implementation issues associated with using a particular model and the journal only publishes highly theoretical, mathematical papers, find a different journal.
- The title and abstract should clearly describe the problem. The abstract should provide a guide to the key findings of the paper. Statements like “We show that our algorithm can solve instances of the problem with 40,000 nodes (or 10 times the number of nodes of any previously solvable instances) in less than an hour of CPU time” are preferable to statements like “We solve large instances of the problem.”
- The introduction and conclusions of the paper should be written for a broad audience (e.g., operations researchers), not just for the handful of researchers who may be interested in the details of your problem and solution approach. The introduction should clearly state what your contribution to the literature and to the problem is. This will enable the editorial staff to quickly determine if this is truly a contribution to the literature or if it is not. For example, if your contribution is that you can find the minimum cost order quantity with fixed annual demand and fixed order and holding costs, a good (or even not-so-good) editor will recognize this as an EOQ model, which we have known how to solve for decades. Such a paper would (should) be rejected very quickly. In assessing the contribution, think about why anyone would want to read the paper. Similarly, the conclusions should summarize the paper and its contributions in broad language accessible to a wide audience. The conclusions should also clearly state limitations of the work (our work only applies to linear cost functions) and outline directions for future work in the area.
- The literature review should focus on relevant literature — not necessarily every paper that has been published in the field, broadly defined. That said, be sure to reference the key works in the field. One rule might be that if a paper appears on the first page of a Google Search for your topic and you don’t cite it, you should clearly know why you are not doing so. At the end of the literature review, the reader and editors should have a clear picture of what your contribution to the field is.
- Clearly cite your own related work and clearly delineate the contribution that the current paper makes over and above the contributions of your earlier work. A failure to do this can be — and has been — viewed as self-plagiarism, which is essentially a form of plagiarism. The penalties for plagiarism are severe. Please see https://pubsonline.informs.org/authorportal/copyright-plagiarism.
- Try hard to keep the paper short and to avoid unnecessary notation. While we have not done a study of this phenomenon, we suspect that review times increase (perhaps faster than linearly) with the length of the paper and with the density of the mathematics in a paper.
- To the extent possible, use figures and graphs to summarize key results. If your key finding is that the solution time grows linearly with the size of the problem, plot a graph of the solution time versus the size of the problem. Run a regression showing the fit of the time to the size of the problem. Simply putting all of the data in a table obscures this finding. It is also advisable to use figures and graphs to help explain models and algorithms (where appropriate).
- Be sure the paper is well-written. Consider having the paper edited by a native English-speaking editor. Many universities and companies either employ such editors or have lists of qualified editors in the area. Poorly written papers — papers with either bad English grammar or poorly organized papers — are likely to be rejected even if they have a contribution to make. INFORMS provides some information about technical editing support services. Please see https://pubsonline.informs.org/authorportal/presubmission-editing.
- When responding to referee comments,
- You do not have to respond to everything. First, a good editor will tell you what you need to respond to and what you do not need to respond to. Second, even without that advice, you do not have to do everything a referee asks you to do. Often referee requests are contradictory […the paper is 50% longer than it should be…. But, the literature review is inadequate and also please extend the computational results in the following eight ways and please consider two alternate objective functions.]
- Briefly explain why you are not responding to those comments to which you elect not to respond.
- Clearly highlight changes in the paper when it is resubmitted.
- When you submit a paper for review, you are implicitly agreeing to do 2-3 reviews for others. Finding referees for papers is a major source of delay. It is not uncommon for an associate editor to have to ask 3-5 people to get one willing to review a paper. If you expect 2-3 reviews, you need to be willing to do 2-3 reviews for others. For papers with multiple authors, you may be tempted to divide that number by the number of authors, but in reality the more senior authors are the ones often asked to referee the work of others. This is simply a matter of flow conservation: you are introducing a demand for 3 reviews (for example) and so you should be willing to perform 3 reviews for the profession.