Editorial: Which Universities Contribute to the Practice Literature? The First Interfaces Ranking

Organizations and professions get what they measure and reward. If we want educational programs to contribute to OR/MS practice, we have to figure out how to measure such contributions. The INFORMS Academic/Practitioner Interface Committee has discussed the possibility of ranking or rating academic programs on their contributions to OR/MS practice. Many difficulties stand in its way—difficulties in implementation and, especially, in defining the rating scale. How should a scale measure such factors as training students for practice, contributing to the practice literature, contributing to theory useful for practice, and conducting cooperative projects with industry? How should it combine such measures?

Such overall rankings would necessarily be highly subjective and difficult to implement well. As editor of a publication focused on practice, I am interested in a more limited goal. I want a scale that measures one aspect of a university's contribution to practice: its contribution to the practice literature. I want deans who promulgate goals for their programs to have available a measure of such contributions. To encourage and reward such contributions, I want recognition for the programs that make them. To that end, I developed an index—the Interfaces index of contributions to the practice literature. Like all measurement schemes, it has limitations. Even so, when I applied it to the literature from 1988 to 1994, I obtained some interesting results and a ranking of universities. I plan to update the index and the rankings periodically.