From the Editor—A Vision for Increasing Our Impact

Management Science is one of the very best journals in business and engineering, so I am incredibly honored to have been selected as the editor-in-chief of this esteemed publication. In this editorial, I would like to outline the key goals I have in mind for the next few years.

Before looking ahead, I would like to acknowledge and thank my predecessor, Gérard Cachon, who made significant improvements to this journal, most importantly by streamlining the reviewing process and establishing rapid, achievable turnaround times for editors and reviewers, to the benefit of our authors. Not only has this made our journal a model of review efficiency, it has also resulted in a steady increase in the number of submissions we receive, a healthy trend that I aim to sustain.

Increasing Our Impact

The increasing number of submissions competing for limited space means that we have to be very selective in the articles that we publish. This has raised the quality of our journal and increased its prestige. Our impact factor also rose to 2.546 in 2013 from 1.86 in 2012. One of my goals is to further increase our impact factor, building on what our editorial teams developed over the past few years.

One way to do this is to ensure that we always receive first-run papers and papers that appeal to a large group of readers. To this end, I encourage our editorial teams to actively seek out papers that they think are likely to have a high impact and work with the authors to craft these papers into articles that we must publish.

Another is to broaden the scope of what appears in Management Science. To do this, I plan to add a new section titled “Perspectives,” similar to the section in Science. This section will include opinion pieces from leading researchers on exciting ideas in emerging areas, highlighting fundamental research and findings, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary work.

Maintaining Our Editorial Excellence

Continuing the streamlining efforts of past years, I am also introducing a new policy whereby reviewers will evaluate a paper twice, at most. That is, a clear editorial decision must be made after two rounds of review. If there are still minor revisions required after the second evaluation, only the department and associate editors will evaluate the revision. I believe that this will reduce the workload on our reviewers and will make our review process even more efficient and author-friendly, increasing the productivity of our authors without compromising the quality of the journal.

Increasing Our Synergy

Another thing I would like to focus on is interdisciplinary work, specifically, creating and increasing synergy between departments. With the variety of departments we have, we cover almost all research areas found in a typical business school. However, each department is quite independent, and there is little interaction between them. I aim to change this by undertaking initiatives such as special issues that cut across departments. I may also create new departments to publish important research in emerging, interdisciplinary fields such as data science and healthcare, which are not explicitly covered by our existing departments. These are simply considerations at present; we shall wait and see how things develop.

Welcoming Our New Editors

As part of the renewal process, I would like to welcome our new department and associate editors. I look forward to working with each of you to advance the journal over the coming years. Our current editorial staff can be found at http://pubsonline.informs.org/page/mnsc/editorial-board.

In Conclusion

Management Science is in the leading position it’s in because of the hard work put in by its editors-in-chief, department editors, associate editors, staff, reviewers, and authors. We will work together to continue the journal’s legacy of excellence, increasing and broadening its impact. Working together, I believe we can make it an even more impactful, relevant journal, one that anticipates and diffuses cutting-edge knowledge in our field.

Department Editors

James Smith

Lee Fleming

David Hsu

Jerome Detemple

Wei Jiang

Lorin Hitt

Sandra Slaughter

Pradeep Chintagunta

Yossi Aviv

Martin Lariviere

Dimitris Bertsimas

Jesper Sørensen

Assaf Zeevi

Associate Editors

Klaus Schmidt

Ron Adner

Glenn MacDonald

Anita McGahan

Joanne Oxley

J. Myles Shaver

Matthias Ehrgott

Robert Winkler

April Franco

Laura Kornish

Jasjit Singh

Catherine Tucker

Arvids Ziedonis

Michael Johannes

Jeffrey Pontiff

Paul Tetlock

Chris Dellarocas

Il-Horn Hann

Waleed Muhanna

Edieal Pinker

Kate Stewart

Yong Tan

Asim Ansari

Doug Bowman

Ganesh Iyer

Vrinda Kadiyali

Harikesh Nair

Debu Purohit

Priya Raghubir

Greg Shaffer

K. Sudhir

Rajeev Tyagi

Naufel Vilcassim

John Zhang

Fernando Bernstein

Francis de Vericourt

Wedad Elmaghraby

Jérémie Gallien

Noah Gans

Fikri Karaesmen

Yuri Levin

Mahesh Nagarajan

Tava Olsen

Michael Pinedo

Nicola Secomandi

Fuqiang Zhang

Garud Iyengar

Retsef Levi

Tom Luo

Jonathon Cummings

Hillary Anger Elfenbein

Brayden King

Ezra Zuckerman

Mor Armony

William Cooper

Moshe Haviv

Shane Henderson

Paat Rusmevichientong

Yong-Pin Zhou