Editorial Column—Toward Ten Years of Service Science
Service Science has published 201 research articles since its first issue in 2009. Next year will mark Service Science’s 10th anniversary. In 2017, Service Science published 25 research articles, including 6 articles in 2 special sections (March) and 7 in 1 special issue (December). I am pleased to report the submission rate has increased and the acceptance rate is down. The impact factor is now greater than one, according to Journal Citation Reports. Average time to first action has been decreasing (now under three months), and average time to final decision is decreasing as well (now under four months). This past year, we added a third area editor, Sriram Dasu (customer-centered service), who joined Lisa Maillart (healthcare services) and Seyed Iravani (service operations management), area editors added in the prior year. Together, we relied on the assistance of many volunteer reviewers and Editorial Board members. All 2017 reviewers are listed in this issue, along with the current Advisory Board and Editorial Board members. We also benefitted from dedicated, helpful staff in the INFORMS publication office, especially Kelly Kophazi, our managing editor, and Meaghan Maegerle, our production editor. We thank all for their dedication, their efforts, and continued support.
INFORMS Service Science is carving out a unique niche among service-related journals, with service its main object of study and with no commitment to specific applications or traditional disciplines. Service comprises activities and technologies that create value through interaction of multiple stakeholders, often incorporating information and technology to enhance or enable effective human action and interaction. Thus, Service Science covers a broad range of application areas and methods related to service, and its reach seems ever expanding.
This year, Service Science published articles on cloud computing, customer engagement, emotion in services, measuring service value, service guarantees, customer satisfaction, servicescape design for healthcare, brand loyalty, service employees, retail pricing, video-game innovation, optimization in car-sharing, service systems, product-service systems, service engineering, university services, IT services, recommender systems, analytics in the hospitality industry, service dominant logic, service logistics, and service supply chain. These represent many traditional areas and subdisciplines of service research (e.g., satisfaction, loyalty, pricing, optimization, supply chain, etc.), as well as some novel and cross-disciplinary areas (e.g., cloud computing and information technology, analytics, innovation, and design, etc.). The aim is integration and synthesis of topics and techniques aimed at understanding and improving all kinds of service and from all perspectives. As it was 10 years ago, it is today: the field of service science and the mission of the journal must evolve together. Today, the mission reads as follows:
Modern businesses rely on technology, communication, information, automation, and globalization. They operate in a complex web of suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders, creating value by sharing skills and capabilities with others for mutual benefit. The field of service science is emerging as the study of such complex services and service systems, and involves~methods and theories from a range of disciplines, including operations, industrial engineering, marketing, computer science, psychology, information systems, design, and more. Effective understanding of service and service systems often requires combining multiple methods to consider how interactions of people, technology, organizations, and information create value under various conditions.
Service Science publishes innovative and original papers on all topics related to service, including work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. It is the primary forum for presenting new theories and new empirical results in the emerging, interdisciplinary science of service, incorporating research, education, and practice, documenting empirical, modeling, and theoretical studies of service and service systems. Topics covered include but are not limited to the following:
Service management and operations
Service engineering and design
Service marketing
Service system analysis and computational simulation
Service theory and methods
Case studies of service.
Application areas include the following:
Healthcare
Energy
Financial services
Information technology
Big data analytics
Logistics and service supply chain
Public sector
Education
Block chain-enable services
Disruptive services
Hospitality
Disaster recover
Sharing economy
Mobility applications
Green and sustainability services
Smart services
We look forward to seeing how the field evolves and to continuing to update the journal’s mission over the next 10 years and beyond, leading the way toward a new service science.
