ویژگی های ژورنال، رتبه بندی و فرهنگ اجتماعی در مدیریت عملیات

Over the past View the MathML source, there have been several attempts in operations management to rate journals, authors and schools based on their research productivity and quality. While many of these have been very helpful in generating a relative ranking of productivity and prestige, these analyses seem incomplete in many ways. Most notably, they neglected the fact that these rankings are loaded with value judgments acquired in the process of academic acculturation on one hand and that they did not provide basic information about the journals on the other. This paper argues that the rankings reflect the milieu in which they were conceived and calls for “usage-based” measures as more appropriate ways of measuring a publication's impact through influencing and changing the thinking and actions of researchers, students and practitioners. Specifically, this article has three objectives. First, it fills an information gap by giving the characteristics of 28 journals in the broadly-defined field of operations management. Second, the article summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches taken to rank journals. Third, this article shows some factors of social acculturation (acquired either through education or working in different environments) in the journal evaluation process. The empirical part of the paper is based on analyzing referencing practices of these journals, surveying senior editors, analyzing reading lists of doctoral programs at major research universities, and contacting university and corporate libraries, and consulting companies.

1. Introduction In the past View the MathML source, there has been a new-found interest in measuring the influence and strength of authors and journals in the broadly-defined field of operations management [2]. The published efforts have mainly been of three types: (1) simply counting the number of articles published in a pre-determined set of journals by researchers and institutions, taking into account the perceived quality differences among journals (e.g., [3] and [4]); (2) a survey of academics to determine the perceived influence or quality of journals (e.g., [5] and [6]); or (3) a citation analysis to see which authors, journals and institutions are the most influential (e.g., [7], [8] and [9]). Despite all their differences, the three methods reflect an internal, research community-based view of publications. The pioneer of the “journal ranking” studies in the operations management field, Saladin [10], was much broader in his assessment as he included both academicians and practitioners in his survey to determine top quality OM-oriented journals—an idea that has not been followed so far. As suggested by the literature of other fields, practitioners should also be used to as a reference when the practical significance or usefulness of research is evaluated [11], [12] and [13]. The “real” life of a publication starts after it is published, because then it becomes available for the broader public and its impact can be felt. In this paper, we argue for a usage-based notion of impact and define it as the extent to which a journal is actually used or has the potential to be used. The impact of a journal can be the inclusion of its articles in educational or executive programs (as a “must read” for doctoral students, for example), or getting labeled as a “must have” in academic, corporate and consulting libraries. Different inquiry paradigms can be used to rank journals. The common assumption of all these paradigms is that of the value-determined nature of inquiry [14]. The scale ranges from the objectivist approaches to the relativist ones. Objectivists are rationalists and in their world “the relationships and observations are considered to be independent of the theories used to explain them” [15]. Most approaches used for journal rankings were based on a dominantly objectivist model—implicitly or explicitly stating that the ranking is independent from the values of the author, from time, space and environment. We are more on the relativist side on this issue and believe that there may be several conflicting rankings, reflecting the views of different communities, and these rankings to a great extent are the products of social acculturation and editorial actions. This article has three objectives: First, Section 2 gives an overview of potential publication outlets in the broadly-defined field of production and operations management (POM). We have found that despite all the rankings and perceptions about the journals, the objective characteristics of the journals were not presented. Second, Section 3 summarizes the approaches taken to rank journals, shows the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and builds on research in other fields. Third, the article shows how factors of social acculturation (acquired either through education or working in different environments) affects the evaluation of a journal's influence. The empirical part of the paper is based on analyzing referencing practices of journals, surveying senior editors, contacting corporate and university libraries, consulting companies, and analyzing reading lists of major research universities. Section 4 discusses the research samples and methodologies, while Section 5 presents the results. The paper ends with a discussion of the findings and conclusions.

This article gave some important characteristics of potential publication outlets in the POM field. Knowing more about the editorial philosophies, readership characteristics and the review process of journals can help authors in choosing the most appropriate outlet for their manuscripts. Knowing how these journals are perceived by different segments of POM community may also be helpful. However, it is not enough to know the rankings of journals, we should also know the factors that influence the rankings. The perception about the most influential journals is dependent on the field of education, so the perceived journal impact is not an objective category, rather it is interpreted through the many layers of social acculturation, of which education is one factor. We showed that different fields have different referencing practices and authors model their referencing behavior on the established practice within their particular sub-field. Journals that emphasize theory are associated with more references, journals that emphasize practicality have more recent references. This behavior also shows a socialization process; the authors accept and copy unwritten norms in their referencing practices. Goh et al. [8] pointed out that a journal's influence in the field is a function of the quality of the journal's articles, the relevance of their contents to the discipline, and the exposure of the journal to the field's researchers. In this paper, we addressed these three elements of journal influence from a different angle. We found that an academic journal's influence is linked to the quality of its review process. However, establishing a good gate-keeping function is a necessary but not sufficient condition for making a journal influential in a business setting. Even in an academic environment, placing too much emphasis on the quality-control related aspects of the review process may block the publication of innovative but non-conformist ideas (Armstrong [53]). We have analyzed the relevance of journals to the discipline through their usage in educating the next generation of POM professors and through academic library subscriptions to the journal. As an additional indicator, we measured the business relevance of journals through corporate and consulting company subscriptions. A logical extension of this study would be to move from the library level to the individual user level and investigate a journal's impact through surveying operations managers or consultants specialized on POM topics. With advances in technology, operations management research becomes more widely disseminated, and perhaps this will cause a change in the way that journals, articles and researchers are evaluated. In the not-so-distant future as subscription shifts from hard copies to electronic copies, usage-related information will be easier to collect and will be more relevant to the influence of a journal or an article. Even today, journal title providers record how many times certain journals or articles are accessed and use this information in their “title” (journal) positioning and pricing. Perhaps the shift towards internet-based methods of disseminating articles and tracking the status of manuscripts may cause a large change in the way articles and journals are reviewed, read and evaluated. In this paper, we focused on the post-publication life of articles as they related to the journals. We would like to argue, as an extension of this study, for an analysis of the pre-publication research process. We believe that the pre-publication infrastructure of a journal, its broadly-defined review process, will be more and more important in the years-to-come in influencing, motivating and attracting authors and nurturing new ideas. The way how the editorial operations and particularly the review process is run will play a bigger role in distinguishing among journals. The editorial philosophy of a journal, a journal's strategic positioning, its review process, and the clarity of its articles are particularly important in nurturing and helping innovative ideas to reach their intended market and have an impact there. We would suggest that measures like the Gunning–Fog index be used to increase the clarity of published research. Incomprehensible writing in other fields has led these fields to be seen by members of the public as increasingly remote and irrelevant. We must take steps that it does not happen to OM. Moreover, further research is needed to investigate the effect of the pre-publication infrastructure on the journals’ influence on the field.