Note from the Editor

First, I would like to share with you a few annual IJOC facts from our end-of-year-2022 statistics compared with five years ago. Submissions to the journal were a record high at 381 (up 78%), median time to first decision dropped to 122 days (down 26%), impact factor rose to 3.288 (up 236%), and downloads leaped to 128,009 (up 462%). We also moved to publishing bimonthly from quarterly and have reduced our publishing backlog to less than two issues (down 79%). These remarkable achievements are due to all of you: the readers, authors, reviewers, editors, and production team of IJOC. We have a lot to be proud of!

I also want to highlight that this issue contains the final of four “Challenge Papers,” each authored by a plenary speaker at the 2022 INFORMS Computing Society Conference held in Tampa, FL. To inspire and guide researchers in our field, the journal invited each speaker to write a short challenge paper related to their area of expertise. The plenary speakers are Katya Scheinberg, Illya Hicks, and Andrea Lodi (whose papers have already appeared), and Ojas Parekh, whose paper appears in this issue. Each paper is published open access so all can benefit from them.

Ojas’s paper, “Synergies Between Operations Research and Quantum Information Science,” is particularly timely because the topic of quantum computing has stimulated much recent interest. IJOC welcomes papers that involve quantum computing and its intersection with operations research. We expect this field will grow in activity and are ready to publish its impactful research.

All my best,