At the time of writing we have been in post as Editors for nearly two calendar years and it is time to review progress. In our first Editorial (January 2011) we said we were seeking new Associate Editors in North America, mainland Europe and Asia, and earlier this year we were delighted that Professor Andrew Lim of City University Hong Kong and Professor Gilbert Laporte of HEC Montreal, Canada were able to accept our invitations to join Graham Kendall and Mike Pidd as Associate Editors.
Since we took up our duties many papers have almost completed a full publication lifecycle having been scrutinised by referees, amended, perhaps re-refereed and revised again before finally being accepted and appearing in Advance Online Publication (AOP). The first papers that we accepted for publication have now appeared in print. Hence, it may be appropriate to present some statistics on acceptance rates. Between 1 January 2010 and 20 September 2011 there were 995 submissions and final decisions have been made on 759 of them. Of the 759, 14.5% were accepted. This is somewhat lower than in previous years although some papers are still to complete the lifecycle and so we would expect the steady-state acceptance rate to be a little higher. The number of submissions has increased since we began with as many submissions in the first 9 months of 2011 as within the whole of 2010.
The backlog of papers available on AOP, but not yet in print has fallen substantially during 2011. We understand that authors prefer their paper to appear in print as soon as possible and so we expanded the January, April, June and July issues to reduce the backlog. For 2011 as a whole we have published around 400 more pages than were originally scheduled and the queue of papers waiting to go into print is now down to around 6 months.
In volume 62 (2011), we published three Special Issues; in February on Heuristic Optimisation, in March on Supply Chain Forecasting and Planning and in May on OR's contribution to Supporting Strategy. We are grateful to the Guest Editors who carefully put these Issues together. We have also accepted plans for five forthcoming Special Issues. The first of these is Systems to Build Systems, which is now closed to new submissions. The others are Healthcare OR, Credit Risk Modelling, Sustainable Operations Management and OR in Construction and Engineering Management. Healthcare OR only accepts submissions from authors of paper presented at the INFORMS Healthcare Conference in Montreal in 2011. The other three issues are open calls.
During the year we have published a selection of Book Reviews in five issues and Viewpoints in the April issue and we are grateful to our Book Review Editor Jim Chilcott and to our Viewpoints Editor Aris Syntetos for editing these.
In our 2011 Editorial we announced our plan to do away with the classification of papers into General papers, Theoretical papers and Case-Oriented papers and this will be realised from this issue onwards. We have retired the distinction because we believe that theoretical papers should have practical relevance and that case studies do have theoretical and technical content. The criteria for publication of all papers remain relevance, impact, originality and clarity. The change is intended to emphasise that all papers published in the journal should have a strong practical focus and we encourage the submission of case-oriented papers that provide thoughtful reflection on any aspect of the application of OR methodologies.
Over the last 2 years, thanks to the efforts of our predecessors, John Wilson and Terry Williams, the ranking of the journal in the Operations Research and Management Science category SCI citations has improved as has the 2-year impact factor. We aim to continue to improve these statistics in a number of ways. These include the careful selection of papers based on the above criteria and by attracting even more high quality papers.
During the year John Wilson saw the remaining papers in the old submission system through to publication and provided support for the new editorial team in many other ways. We reiterate our gratitude to him for his advice and help during the handover period.
Producing the journal is a team effort. We continue to rely and appreciate the enormous help of our colleagues at the OR Society and at Palgrave. We would especially like to thank Sarah Parry our Editorial Assistant and Ros Pyne and Guy Edwards at Palgrave. We would particularly like to thank our Production Director Jane Torr for her efficiency and patience.
Of course we are particularly appreciative of the authors who submit their work to us and the referees who tirelessly give their time and attention carefully ensuring that only the very best papers appear in the journal.