A New Hope? Insights from the 2025 Edition of INFORMS Journals’ Impact Factors

Two years ago, we warned that INFORMS journals were entering a turbulent period due to changes in impact factor methodology, and predicted that “the decline could continue for many journals next year until impact factors stabilize in 2025” [1]. Last year, we reported that this prediction was realized and offered a few thoughts on how our community could respond [2].

With the most recent impact factors now published [3], the third part of our impact factor trilogy offers a new hope: As we predicted in 2023, the decline has markedly slowed, and several journals have rebounded. Yet, as in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, an early victory still leaves deeper structural challenges. In this article, we examine the new baseline, its vulnerabilities and opportunities for the operations research and management science (OR/MS) community.

A New Baseline Emerges

Clarivate’s 2025 edition of Journal Citation Reports (reporting 2024 impact factors) shows a picture that is both hopeful and sobering (see Table 1). Instead of the across‑the‑board declines we chronicled in 2023, 8 of 12 INFORMS journals now show year‑over‑year increases. Management Science has climbed from 4.6 to 4.9, partially regaining ground lost in 2022, and Marketing Science has jumped from 4.0 to nearly 5.0. Operations Research has moved from 2.2 to 2.6 after two years of decline, whereas Organization Science has edged up from 4.9 to 5.4. Smaller titles have seen even larger swings: INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics rose from 1.1 to 1.8 (a 64% gain), and Mathematics of Operations Research increased by roughly 36% to 1.9.

In total, the average impact factor across all INFORMS journals increased by roughly 6%, suggesting that the free fall has stopped. This widespread, if modest, rebound signals a new baseline. However, the picture is uneven across the roster. Four journals continued to decline in 2024: Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM) slipped from 4.8 to 4.2, its impact factor now 41% below the 2021 high of 7.103; Decision Analysis fell from 2.5 to 1.5, erasing the gains it made in 2023; INFORMS Journal on Computing nudged down from 2.3 to 2.1; and Service Science dropped from 1.9 to 1.3. These declines highlight the fragility of specialized journals: A handful of highly cited papers can lift or depress the metric, and the effects of Clarivate’s methodology change have not yet washed through for every title [1].

Table 1: Clarivate’s 2025 Journal Citation Reports (reporting 2024 impact factors) for INFORMS journals.

Looking back to 2021 clarifies just how much the baseline has shifted. At the pandemic‑era peak, Management Science reached 6.172, M&SOM topped 7.103 and Operations Research stood at 3.924. Three years later, these journals sit roughly 20%, 41% and 34%, respectively, below those levels, even after this year’s uptick. Decision Analysis is only slightly below its 2021 level, but because its 2023 figure was unusually high, the 2024 decline appears dramatic.

Only two INFORMS journals now exceed their pre‑COVID numbers: Organization Science rose from 5.152 to 5.4, whereas the rebranded INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (formerly titled Interfaces) has climbed from 1.169 to 1.8, a 54% increase.

These trajectories reveal that the 2021 numbers were an anomaly fueled by early‑access policies and the COVID citation boom [1]; today’s figures represent a more realistic equilibrium. Editors and authors must therefore calibrate expectations to this new orbit.

Interdisciplinary Forces Shape Impact

INFORMS flagships occupy a solid mid-tier when benchmarked against journals in adjacent fields: Management Science (4.9), Organization Science (5.4), Information Systems Research (5.1) and Operations Research (2.6) trail general-management leaders like Academy of Management Journal (10.5) and Academy of Management Review (13.9) and top economics outlets such as American Economic Review (11.6) and Quarterly Journal of Economics (12.7). In computing and AI, the gap is wider: ACM Computing Surveys (28.0) and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (18.6) reflect much larger audiences, survey-driven citation spikes and faster citation cycles. Despite lower impact factors, several INFORMS journals rank near the top of their OR/MS category and appear on prestigious lists like the FT50 [4], showing that perceived quality and institutional value do not map one-to-one to impact factors.

Why do OR/MS journals as a group struggle to keep pace with adjacent fields like finance or economics? A recent analysis of 4.6 million citations across 252 business journals reveals that only 30% of citations in OR/MS journals are internal, versus nearly 50% in finance [5]. This means OR/MS is inherently outward‑looking: Our papers draw on and contribute to adjacent fields such as economics, computer science and social science. The main exception in our field is Management Science. Indeed, according to this analysis, “Management Science is in a unique position: the most dominant journal in the discipline that also has a high ratio of external to internal citations” [5]. That is, looking across operations journals, Management Science exemplifies an outward orientation, boasting one of the highest ratios of external to internal citations in the field of operations.

We believe that editors would do well to embrace this identity by soliciting papers with cross‑disciplinary appeal and marketing accepted articles to broader audiences. This was precisely the approach applied by Management Science starting in 2018: recruiting referees, editors and papers from other fields including computer science, economics, finance, social science and statistics.

Lessons for the Next Chapter

What should the OR/MS community take away from the impact factor trends?

First, accept the lower baseline. The impact factor trends in the past four years show that the early‑pandemic highs were unsustainable. Impact factors for most INFORMS journals remain 20%-40% below their 2021 peaks even after this year’s uptick. This reset is not a failure but a return to normalcy after a once‑in‑a‑century event (the COVID-19 pandemic) and a one‑time methodology change.

Editors and authors should stop chasing the phantom numbers of 2021 and instead invest in what endures: rigorous scholarship and timely publication. That means speeding up review cycles, providing early access to accepted papers and measuring success on longer horizons. By recalibrating expectations and focusing on quality, the community can weather short‑term volatility.

Second, lean into our cross‑disciplinary identity. OR/MS has always been a bridge discipline, which explains our outward citation patterns [5]. To turn that openness into impact, journals should actively seek papers that connect OR/MS to economics, computer science, psychology and engineering. Special issues co‑edited with other societies, joint sessions at major conferences and papers that translate OR/MS advances for nonspecialists will widen our citation network.

At the same time, O.R. researchers should embrace the empirical revolution transforming the social sciences [6]. Causal inference, field experiments, and data science and AI methods can make our work more relevant to policymakers and practitioners and attract citations from adjacent fields.

Finally, diversify evaluation metrics and educate gatekeepers. The two‑year journal impact factor is only one measure of influence. Alternative metrics tell a richer story. Google Scholar Metrics rely on each journal’s best cited papers, which accumulate influence over time [7]; the Altmetric Attention Score captures how published research is impacting media coverage, social media activities and policy documents [8]. Hiring committees, letter writers, deans and ranking agencies should consider this basket of metrics when evaluating scholars and journals. We also encourage INFORMS journals to adopt Altmetric tracking – common in many fields – to motivate authors to extend the reach and real-world impact of their publications.

Looking Ahead: Hope with Eyes Wide Open

Our previous articles predicted that impact factors would decline before stabilizing by 2025. That forecast has proven largely accurate: The worst is behind us, but the field has settled into a humbler orbit. The new data also yields unexpected insights. OR/MS is more outward‑facing than most business disciplines.

Across our various recommendations, the common theme is openness – to other fields, to varied metrics and to the broader public. If we cultivate that openness and uphold rigorous standards, we can ensure that the “Force” will be with us in the chapters to come.

References

1. David Simchi-Levi and Tinglong Dai, 2023, “Unraveling the mystery of impact-factor declines in most of INFORMS journals,” INFORMS Open Forum, INFORMS Connect, July 11,https://bit.ly/informs23if.
2. David Simchi-Levi and Tinglong Dai, 2024, “Embracing the impact: Understanding the decline of impact factors in INFORMS journals and the future of OR/MS publishing,” OR/MS Today, September 5, https://doi.org/10.1287/orms.2024.03.07.
3. https://clarivate.com/news/clarivate-unveils-the-2025-journal-citation-reports/
4. Laurent Ormans, 2016, “50 journals used in FT research rank,” Financial Times, September 12, https://www.ft.com/content/3405a512-5cbb-11e1-8f1f-00144feabdc0.
5. Jie Yan, Mustapha Elkhouja and Jie Xiong, 2021, “Cross-disciplinary knowledge connections and bridging journals: The evolution of business scholarship from 1990 to 2010,” Management International, Vol. 25, pp. 229-239, https://doi.org/10.7202/1088147ar.
6. https://www.nber.org/digest/oct17/other-fields-show-rising-interest-economics-research
7. https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues
8. https://www.altmetric.com/about-us/our-data/donut-and-altmetric-attention-score/