Editorial: New developments at the Journal of Operations Management

• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Tyson R. Browning,Suzanne Treville
• Date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2018.12.005

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Operations Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jom

Editorial: New developments at the Journal of Operations Management

1. Introduction

As we draw near to a year in office as co-Editors-in-Chief (EICs) of

JOM, we would like to bring the JOM community up to date on what is

happening at the journal and share new developments that we have

been discussing with the Department Editors (DEs) and also presenting

in various venues. We will also use this occasion to share our goals and

aspirations for the journal and the field.

We would like to begin by expressing our gratitude to Dan Guide

and Mikko Ketokivi for their leadership of JOM over the past several

years. They instituted many important advancements, not the least of

which is the department structure from which we all now benefit. They

also formalized the editorial process for evaluating submissions, es-

tablished clearer expectations for Editorial Review Board (ERB) mem-

bers and Associate Editors (AEs) in terms of accepting invitations to

review, and raised the methodological standards for acceptable re-

search. These difficult transitions took the journal to a new level. It is an

honor to follow their vanguard.

We look forward to working together with the JOM community not

only to maintain the excellent reputation of the journal but also to

broaden and enhance it. As EICs, our top goals include building the

community of empirical scholars in operations management (OM), in-

creasing the number of high-quality submissions both to JOM and to the

field in general (whether or not those manuscripts end up published at

the journal), maintaining reasonable lead times, developing the re-

viewer community, and bolstering JOM's scholarly impact and practical

relevance. We have added new departments to encourage submissions

in underutilized regions of the journal's scope. Building on the work

done by the previous EICs, we are working to clarify expectations with

respect to methods such as survey research. Developing the peer-review

process and encouraging manuscripts that target underutilized regions

of the journal's scope provide a wealth of opportunities that we intend

to mine. The remainder of this article provides further details on these

points.

2. Enhancing the peer-review process

Let us first take a moment to reflect on the meaning of peer review.

An article is published when a group of peers agrees that it is suffi-

ciently interesting, well written, and doing what it claims to do. Authors

sometimes complain that the review team did not understand their

submission and suggest that a “better” team would have figured it out.

This demonstrates wrong understanding of the objective of peer review:

If the review team did not understand, then that provides useful feed-

back to the authors about needed clarification. Review team members

are not perfect, and their assessment of a manuscript is not a declara-

tion from an oracle—but many members of the research community

expect oracle-like outcomes. When we take the peer-review process for

what it is, useful insights emerge into how to improve its functioning

both for reviewers and for review teams.

Making reviews developmental seems to be a common priority

across journals. We would like to recognize the emphasis develop-

mental reviewing has received at JOM. We are delighted when reviewer

reports give authors and editors a clear understanding of what it will

take to improve a manuscript. A gatekeeper reviewer who concludes

that a manuscript's contribution does not warrant publication in JOM,

feeling that their job is finished, may shift focus to capturing arguments

to reject the paper. A developmental reviewer, in contrast, will seek to

produce a review that will aid the authors in moving forward with their

research. Although that developmental reviewer identifies flaws and

missing pieces in a manuscript, they do so while maintaining a “glass

half full” approach by answering the question, “What would it take to

make this manuscript publishable in JOM?” Even when the specific

manuscript does not make a JOM-level contribution, the guidance

provided by the review team should be of service to the authors. The

reviewer then makes a recommendation to the AE as to whether the

points raised are addressable within a 90-day revision cycle.

This new definition of responsibilities makes it easier to bring in-

experienced reviewers up to speed. When the reviewer's job is to vote

on whether the manuscript is accepted or rejected, recommending ac-

ceptance can be quite frightening, especially when other reviewers find

fatal flaws and recommend rejection. We have observed cases where an

inexperienced reviewer submits a positive review and is then shamed

when other members of the review team find fatal flaws. New reviewers

quickly develop the skill of finding fault, resulting in a review process

built around rejection. Defining the review task as making re-

commendations for improvement not only helps authors, but also

provides a safer environment for reviewers.

This role redefinition also creates space for reviewers to indicate

parts of the manuscript that they do not understand. A reviewer who is

oracle and gatekeeper is expected to demonstrate full understanding of

the work. But, a key benefit of the peer-review process is to identify

opportunities to make the submission easier to understand.

Emphasizing that the process is about peer review rather than

gatekeeping also leads to a redefinition of the role of the AE. The AE

task becomes to synthesize the reports from reviewers together with

their own review into (1) a recommendation to the DE, (2) an action

plan for authors that clearly lays out the path for improving the

manuscript (whether it moves forward at JOM or not), and (3) a formal

evaluation of the reviewers. Under the recommendations-for-improve-

ment model of reviewing, the quality of feedback to reviewers also

improves. Under the gatekeeping model, the main feedback that the

reviewer receives is whether their recommendation matches what was

decided at the editorial level. We have already noted the negative

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2018.12.005

Received 9 November 2018; Accepted 9 November 2018

Journal of Operations Management 64 (2018) 1–6

Available online 12 December 2018

0272-6963/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

T