Looking at ourselves: Lessons about the operations management field learned from our top journals

• Author: Xenophon Koufteros,Ravi Behara,Kenneth Boyer,Elliot Bendoly,Sunil Babbar,Richard Metters
• Date: 01 April 2020
• Published date: 01 April 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1081

JOM FORUM

Looking at ourselves: Lessons about the operations

management field learned from our top journals

Sunil Babbar

1

| Xenophon Koufteros

2

| Elliot Bendoly

3

| Ravi Behara

1

|

Richard Metters

2

| Kenneth Boyer

3

1

Department of Information Technology

and Operations Management, Florida

Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida

2

Department of Information and

Operations Management, Texas A and M

University, College Station, Texas

3

Department of Management Sciences,

Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

Correspondence

Kenneth Boyer, Department of

Management Sciences, Ohio State

University, Columbus, OH.

Email: boyer.9@osu.edu

Handling Editor: Suzanne de Treville

Abstract

We focus here on questions regarding the craft of producing operations man-

agement (OM) research manuscripts. Are the journals we publish in too siloed,

with regard to participating authors and institutions? Likewise, are the OM

departments we work in too intellectually siloed by virtue of journal choice—

are there too many like minds? In light of who publishes in our journals and

who we coauthor with, is our field “global enough”or is North America

weighing too heavily? We also strive to answer a question faced by many OM

departments: should highly published faculty be hired from other schools?

How do such highly published authors influence those around them? We

arrive at partial answers to these questions by exploring an extensive history of

publication data from four journals: Journal of Operations Management,Pro-

duction and Operations Management,Manufacturing and Service Operations

Management, and Management Science.

KEYWORDS

global reach, knowledge integration, operations and supply chain research, operations

management discipline, social network analysis, top journals

1|INTRODUCTION

In the influential book, The Diversity Bonus, Page (2017)

provided substantial evidence and argumentation for the

power of diversity to enhance outcomes in a knowledge

economy. We seek to examine the diversity of our field

and assess the manner in which knowledge development

flows across premiere journals in the field of Operations

Management (OM). We examine several questions. Is our

field embracing global perspectives? Is there a healthy,

consistent flow of knowledge across a diverse set of

journals and geographic regions? Alternatively, do we

have a tendency to accept the comfort of the walled or

siloed communities of practice in our dialogues?

The philosopher of science Kuhn (1962), observing a

tendency in many fields to cling to outdated paradigms,

warned that orthodoxy in thought risks stifling a field.

An infamous debate on diversity versus conformity of

thought occurred between well-known organizational

science scholars Jeff Pfeffer and John Van Maanen in

the 1990s. As suggested in a pivotal piece by Glick,

Miller, and Cardinal (2007), paraphrasing an earlier

work by Van Maanen (1995), a field may prosper by all-

owing a thousand flowers to bloom, with occasional

weeds. The fundamental idea shared by Kuhn (1962),

Van Maanen (1995), and Glick et al. (2007) is that a field

flourishes by encouraging and supporting a mixture of

methods, theories, and approaches to research—that is,

Received: 21 August 2018 Revised: 12 December 2019 Accepted: 13 December 2019

DOI: 10.1002/joom.1081

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided

the original work is properly cited.

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Operations Management published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Association for Supply Chain Management, Inc.

J Oper Manag. 2020;66:349–364. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joom 349

flowers. While some of these may prove to be

unproductive, that is, weeds, the fundamental argument

is that enhancing diversity of thought is a foundational

benefit to a field.

We examine the degree to which publication patterns

in the field of OM demonstrate dispersion rather than

concentration with respect to journal outlets and contrib-

utors. We suggest that orthodoxy decreases when

researchers and universities publish in a wider set of

journals and when journals publish work from a wider

set of researchers. We define this breadth as integration

and suggest that it represents one way to encourage our

OM flowers to bloom. Integration and silo thus represent

opposite ends of a spectrum.

Like Glick et al. (2007) we focus on consensus and

dissensus as we examine several aspects of the OM field's

publication pattern.

We next explore how the operations field has evolved

in its ability to cross national boundaries, first by analyz-

ing the national affiliations of the universities represen-

ted by researchers who publish in our journals, and then

by examining whether national leaders emerge in these

journals. We close by evaluating the benefits that accrue

to a school from hiring a well-published faculty member

from another school. Do highly productive authors stay

that way when they move to a new institution? Do they

make the people around them more productive in

research? We find that well-published authors tend not

to change schools. The few examples where such authors

have changed schools suggest that the authors continue

to publish actively, and the effect of the move on both

the new school and that left behind is small.

We organize our work as follows. Section 2 describes

our data set. Sections 3 through 5 present the results of our

investigation into integration at the individual researcher

and institution levels. The internationalization of the field

is discussed in Section 6. In Section 7 we explore the effect

on research output of moves by some of the most-

published scholars both at the individual and school levels

and in Section 8 we summarize and conclud e.

2|DATA SOURCE

Our data for answering these questions consists of the

body of OM papers published in four journals: Journal of

Operations Management (JOM), Production and Opera-

tions Management (POM), Manufacturing and Service

Operations Management (MSOM), and Management Sci-

ence (MS). These outlets are considered to be the most

highly respected outlets for OM research (Agarwal, 2002;

Meredith, Steward, & Lewis, 2011; Olson, 2005; Shang,

Saladin, Fry, & Donohue, 2015; Theoharakis, Voss,

Hadjinicola, & Soteriou, 2007). They are also included in

the 50 journals that make up the Financial Times

Research Rank (https://www.ft.com/content/3405a512-

5cbb-11e1-8f1f-00144feabdc0) (Financial Times, 2016) as

well as in the University of Texas at Dallas (UT-D) list of

premier journals (University of Texas-Dallas, 2017). The

UT-D list—compiled roughly two decades ago and subse-

quently revised to include journals identified by

Trieschmann, Dennis, Northcraft, and Nieme Jr (2000)

and Bapna and Marsden(2002)—now includes 24 journals,

of which 23 are also present in the Financial Times list.

The analyses in sections 3 through 6 use manually col-

lected data from 2001 to 2015. All papers published in

JOM, POM, and MSOM were included in the data set. As

MS publishes work from a wide range of disciplines, with

a minority of papers addressing OM, we manually

extracted the OM papers from this journal. That a paper

was accepted by a given department has only been explic-

itly stated in recent years on the papers appearing in

MS. All papers identified as having been accepted by the

OM department were included. For earlier years, we iden-

tified manuscripts accepted by the OM department using

the departmental affiliation of the accepting associate edi-

tor. To these, we added manuscripts that addressed OM

issues from the public sector and interdisciplinary depart-

ments. Each special issue article outside of the OM depart-

ment was assessed by at least two authors to determine

which had sufficient OM content to warrant inclusion.

Extracting the OM manuscripts from the total publications

in MS required diligent work over several hundred

person-hours. The analysis in Section 7 uses data from

1990 to 2015 generously furnished by the UT-D.

3|INDIVIDUAL RESEARCHERS

Publishing multiple papers in these four journals is not

easy: We counted 2,880 unique authors who published at

least one paper in these journals over the 15-year period

and compared it to the 2,447 papers published during

that period. Table 1 presents data on the 50 most-

published authors (58 total authors due to a nine-way tie

for 50th) based on total number of papers authored or

coauthored across the four journals from 2001 to 2015. A

detailed examination of Table 1 suggests that the

58 most-prolific scholars published collectively 881 papers

across the four journals in 15 years, averaging 1.01 papers

per year per scholar. For the top 10 most-published

authors, the average is 1.61 papers per year. If we delete

the #1 most-published author as an outlier (who publi-

shed 2.47 papers per year), the average is reduced to 1.49.

The bottom 10 of most-published authors in the list aver-

age 0.74 papers per year.

350 BABBAR ET AL.