Reflecting on 6 years as co-Editors-in-Chief of JOM

Abstract

Our 6 years at the helm of JOM have been a real pleasure—and a lot of work. In this editorial, we reflect on some of the developments during our time in office, provide insights on some current policies, and review some items of interest to the JOM community.

As we began our terms in 2018, our foremost challenge was to increase the number of high-quality submissions to the Journal. Our strategy for this centered on emphasizing underutilized regions of JOM's scope and widening the solution space for contributions (in terms of types, topics, and methods), developing authors and reviewers, and injecting our enthusiasm for OM into the scholarly community. We signaled our interest in additional types of submissions by creating new departments (Empirical Research Methods, Innovation and Project Management, Public Policy and Industry Studies) and broadening others (Design Science became Intervention-based Research, and Marketing and Retail became Operations Interfaces). Our initial editorial (Browning & de Treville, 2018) welcomed new and underrepresented types of submissions such as literature reviews, conceptual papers, and those contributing empirically grounded research questions. JOM's 40th anniversary in 2020 provided an ideal opportunity to reflect on where our field came from and where it could broadly and boldly go (Browning, 2020). We aimed to provoke discussions in our field about the nature and role of topics such as Lean (Browning & de Treville, 2021; Cusumano et al., 2021; Hopp & Spearman, 2021) and Six Sigma (de Treville, Browning, Holweg, & Shah, 2023), where stubborn gaps persist between theory, teaching, and practice. These developments and debates are not standing still; they continue to provide opportunities for our community to engage and move forward. We wrote and accepted editorials and Forum articles on topics such as intervention-based research (Chandrasekaran et al., 2020; Oliva, 2019), warranted claims (Ketokivi & Mantere, 2021), replication studies (Pagell, 2021), and empirically grounding analytics research (de Treville, Browning, & Oliva, 2023). Intervention-based research and the empirical grounding of analytics represent relatively unexplored territory whose development will dramatically contribute to the production of knowledge that will be highly relevant to practice. Building our contributions around warrant rather than futile attempts to “prove” a knowledge claim leads to sounder knowledge creation, as does ensuring the replicability of results. In contrast to calls for more replication, Pagell (2021) focused on the replication process, such that replication is built into ongoing research. Finally, everything that we have done has emphasized the use of formal conceptual definitions (Wacker, 2004).

Coincident with our selection as co-EICs was an awakening of interest from JOM's owner, the Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM, formerly APICS). We were delighted to engage with our new points of contact in this professional society as they sought to expand their academic engagement through various channels. This relationship has been excellent and has the potential to develop even further for mutual benefit. One of the first fruits of this closer relationship was the transition to Wiley as the Journal's new publisher as of 2019, which led to new plumage in the form of a new logo, cover design, paper style, website, and editorial system. Wiley also provided greater resources, including stable funding for the Managing Editor position (filled so ably by Jamie Sanchagrin since 2007) and for EIC travel and meetings with the Department Editors (DEs), as well as increased cash prizes for annual awards. ASCM has begun to incorporate JOM research in their webinars, and has reached an agreement with Wiley whereby ASCM members have access to the journal as part of their membership. We greatly appreciate Wiley's and ASCM's ongoing support for JOM.

These added resources enabled us to broaden JOM's representation at conferences—and even launch a new one. In addition to our usual participation in events and panels at the annual Academy of Management (AoM), Decision Sciences Institute (DSI), and Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) conferences, we represented the Journal at least once at each of the following conferences: ASCM Connect, European Operations Management Association (EurOMA), Industry Studies Association (ISA), European DSI, (US) Northeast Region DSI, (US) Southeast Region DSI, European Academy of Management (EURAM), British Academy of Management (BAM), Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and the Logistics Doctoral Consortium. Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused the middle 2 years of our tenure to look quite different than we had expected, making many events online-only, ironically it created opportunities for participation in further events that otherwise we would not have been likely able to attend in person, such as the International Conference on Operations and Supply Chain Management (ICOSCM), the Global Manufacturing Research Group (GMRG), and the International Project Management Association (IPMA). As part of our efforts to represent the Journal and develop authors and reviewers, we also visited universities around the world to provide developmental sessions and meetings with faculty and students. Visits to several universities in China in 2018 and 2019 were especially notable in this regard. Several DEs also participated in these events.

Recognizing that JOM is one of the few top journals without its own conference, and that the Journal's authors, reviewers, and editors needed an opportunity to bond and grow as a community, we founded the JOM mini-conference in 2020. The Mays Business School at Texas A&M graciously hosted the inaugural event that year. (For most attendees, it was the last in-person conference for at least 2 years.) The concept of the mini-conference is to provide a boutique event for the JOM community to discuss the latest developments at the Journal and network in a less-dispersed setting. The 2021 and 2022 mini-conferences consisted of a series of 3–4 online webinars, which were quite useful under the circumstances, but we were delighted to return to the in-person format with 2023's event hosted by the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

Altogether, we gave over 60 presentations at around 40 universities, as well as at events, conferences, and consortia; served on around 30 journal-editor panels; delivered six AoM professional development workshops (PDWs); organized four JOM mini-conferences; and hosted or presented at least 10 webinars and podcasts. We contributed or oversaw seven editorials and five department editorials, published a dozen special issues, and launched a dozen more. (See Appendix A for lists of these items.) All of these strategic and operational initiatives emerged from our overall strategy of broadening views of OM and invigorating the OM community.

Since clarifying several of the Journal's policies in our 2018 editorial (Browning & de Treville, 2018), we have not made major changes. Here we describe some minor adjustments and further developments.

Since we started as co-EICs in 2018, we have collectively made over 5000 editorial decisions on manuscripts (including revisions). Table 1 provides data on JOM's annual numbers of submissions and their dispositions, as of November 8, 2023. Note that, until all of the manuscripts under review and revision resolve into acceptances or rejections (or “reject and resubmits”), the acceptance rates are not final and can only grow. (We attribute the record number of submissions in 2021 to a “COVID boom,” as many authors must have had nothing to do but sit at home and work on manuscripts. The subsequent dip in new submissions likely indicates a “COVID bust,” once many authors' “top drawers” of manuscripts dried up, while field research was still problematic.) Note that the effective acceptance rate is almost double for manuscripts that pass the desk rejection stage.

Figure 1 shows the number of papers published annually since a low point in 2017. JOM has never published an enormous quantity of papers each year, but now it is back to its historical norms of 10–20 years ago. JOM emphasizes quality over quantity. That said, without lowering the Journal's bar for rigor, our ongoing aim has been to accept more papers that move the field forward on a larger number of fronts. JOM has no limitation on the number of papers it is allowed to accept, as annual page budgets are a thing of the past. (But we are looking for more papers rather than longer papers!)

To keep the Journal competitive and attractive, we have also worked operationally behind the scenes to reduce the duration of the review process. We have been able to make the vast majority of editorial decisions within 90 days. Missing this deadline has almost always been attributable to a late reviewer, AE, DE, or Guest Editor (GE), and we are always looking for additional ways to monitor and support the review process. For papers that went out for regular review, we did an analysis and found no correlation between the duration of the review process and the editorial decision.

Although impact factors are ubiquitous in the world of academic publishing, we resist the temptation to use them to impute overall journal quality. (For evidence, consider the lack of correlation between the top-10 impact-factor journals in our field and those on the Financial Times and UT-Dallas lists.) Whereas the two-year impact factor makes sense for some other fields, we view the 5 and 10-year impact factors as much more relevant to ours, where the process of conducting research, writing a manuscript, and getting it through review and revision to publication seldom takes less than 2 years.

It has been an honor and a privilege to serve the OM field in the capacity of co-EICs over the last 6 years. It is a never-ending job, one from which it is challenging to find a break (as when Suzanne suffered through a small computer-monitor screen and poor internet connectivity in the Finnish forest, and when Tyson took several one-hundred-mile hikes with a laptop computer in his backpack). We look forward to remembering what an actual, disconnected vacation feels like! We have relied on the fantastic support of the entire JOM community, especially the excellent authors, DEs, GEs, AEs, and reviewers who make the Journal what it is. The one person we absolutely could not have done this without is Jamie Sanchagrin, the Managing Editor. We know the Journal is in great hands with the incoming co-EICs, under whose leadership JOM will continue to evolve for the better of our OM community.