Editorial Statement—Operations Management
The Operations Management department publishes research in established areas of operations management such as supply chain management, production planning, service operations, revenue management, quality management, behavioral operations, workforce staffing, and process design and improvement. The department also seeks to promote research on emerging topics such as sustainable operations, energy efficiency, homeland security, humanitarian operations, healthcare operations, emergency response and the sharing economy. Research papers could address operational questions from diverse perspectives, such as those of line workers, operations managers, C-suite executives, third-party providers, or policy makers. We encourage studies related to private and public sectors, as well as industry-specific research such as retail, energy, and healthcare.
The department is open to both analytical and empirical research. Successful analytical papers will use sound modeling techniques or creative algorithms drawn from the fields of mathematical optimization, stochastic processes, statistics, simulation, and game theory. A successful empirical paper will have an appropriate research design, use sound statistical analysis, and relate its research questions and methods to operations management theory of interest. Rigorous execution is necessary, but is not sufficient for publication. Research papers should seek to provide substantive academic contributions and practically relevant insights and algorithms. Importantly, authors should aspire to validate the models, the insights, and the algorithms.
The department welcomes interdisciplinary research. Although interactions are possible with a wide range of disciplines, we anticipate significant opportunities in the intersections between operations management and accounting, marketing, and finance.
Indepndent of its methodology, we expect manuscripts to be of interest to a broad audience in operations management and, ideally, beyond. Specifically, the contribution of a manuscript will be evaluated based not on how the results were obtained, but on whether it delivers novel and interesting insights or solves a specific operational problem by combining (real-world) data with computationally tractable algorithms.
The department will also consider shorter papers with high-quality original high-impact research that is of broader interest, analogous to what might appear in Science, Nature, or PNAS, and to what appeared more frequently in Management Science in its first decades. Such papers should be no more than 5,000 words (including references and everything else not provided in a separate supplementary appendix). Such papers will undergo faster review, with initial decisions being returned to the authors within +/−4 weeks. Papers will either be accepted with potentially modest revisions, or rejected. Authors invited to revise their work should do so within a matter of weeks; the final decision will follow within 1–2 weeks.
Papers in this track will ask and answer important questions by rigorous but simple methods. For example, a paper using a novel analytical approach to provide a better solution to an important practical problem should be compared to an appropriate benchmark but not necessarily against every possible competing algorithm.
Feedback (from the department editor (DE) and potentially from an associate editor (AE) and reviewers) will be quick and usually less detailed than what is provided to traditional papers. Papers that we do not expect will increase the standing of Management Science in the broader scholarly and practitioner community will be rejected by the DE (perhaps in consultation with an AE); the DE may suggest that a paper be resubmitted as a traditional paper.
If you submit your work to this track, please indicate this clearly in your cover letter. All department editors within Operations Management will consider such papers.
