Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS): The last 40 years

Abstract

As the 75th anniversary of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) is celebrated, the opportunity is taken here for previous and current editors of the last 40 volumes to reflect on their experience. This is a companion paper to one written by Graham Rand that summarised the work of those editors who are no longer with us (1950–1984). In this second part covering the last 40 years of the 75 years of the journal’s existence, we will be providing the personal reflections of the past editors and the current ones. During this time a typical issue of the journal changed from containing eight papers in 100 pages, with several book reviews, to one containing 13 papers in 200 pages with no book reviews. It is worth noting, even though several journals were created as part of the OR Society journal portfolio, JORS retains its visibility and its position as the oldest and well-respected OR journal.

Keywords:

• Operational Research Society
• Journal of the Operational Research Society
• history of OR

1. Introduction

This is a collection of editors’ reflections during their respective tenures as editors of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) since 1985. The first three of these editorships were single handled, whereas the last three have been jointly conducted due to the increased volume of papers submitted to the journal. These individual and personal reflections are presented in chronological order, starting with John Hough (1985–1990), followed by Graham Rand (1991–1996), John Ranyard (1997–2001), Terry Williams and John Wilson (2002–2010), Thomas Archibald and Jonathan Crook (2010–2019) and finally the current editors John Boylan, Martin Kunc, Said Salhi and Zhe George Zhang. It is to our great sadness that our friend and colleague, John Boylan, died in July 2023, as this paper was being prepared for submission.

To retain their personal views and style, we have opted to leave their reflections as written, except for formatting. In this way, we hope readers will better enjoy the diversity in terms of style and content of these invaluable and well cherished individual reports.

2. Memoir John Hough: Editing JORS (volumes 36 to 41, 1985–1990): A personal memoir

I plan to confine this nostalgia trip solely to my time in the JORS editorial chair and to avoid any comparative observations about individual papers or volumes. From the outset I was aware of the legacy which I had inherited from my distinguished forebears, who are sadly no longer with us. I regret to say that I have lost touch with the contributions of my successors, and in the interests of brevity and possible litigation, I will leave them to paint their own pictures of their editorial hopes and experiences.

I inherited the “honorary” role as JORS Editor in 1985, having spent my formative years in OR publishing as Book Review Editor of the Journal. In this position I had worked closely with my immediate predecessors, Peter Amiry and Brian Haley, and had absorbed the basics of editorship, mainly by osmosis. I do not recall ever being given any tablets of stone with regard to the nature of JORS, except possibly the importance of deadlines and the need to defend its relevance in the world of OR. Instinctively, I saw my prime responsibility as being to the readers of the Journal, belonging, as they did, to many fuzzy sets: practitioners, researchers, teachers, students and consumers of our end-product. The category of “academics” was deliberately avoided since they inhabit all of the preceding categories and would themselves form a very busy Venn diagram. Further, my own experiences as a full-time OR practitioner in the Aerospace industry suggested that abstract, theoretical approaches to OR did not emerge uniquely from academia nor did non-academics have a monopoly on useful practicality.

As I mentioned earlier, my intention always was to focus on maintaining the Journal’s relevance to its readership. It had to encompass a wide range of tastes and requirements, and this eclectic remit attracted most of the disgruntled comments, usually about balance. There was no shortage of theoretical material in JORS, ranging from major algorithmic breakthroughs which enabled many implementations, to small, abstract diversions which might eventually illuminate a dark corner of a problem seldom encountered. Nonetheless, activities in the mathematical suburbs of OR were also reported in JORS and therefore publicised and encouraged, if not entirely loved. A substantial number of papers addressed methodological concerns proposing and examining different perspectives from which traditional and emerging problems could be better observed. These perspectives ranged from the “very soft” to the “extremely hard” and addressed, amongst other issues, the language of OR, problem structuring, the systems approach, etc.

During my editorship, JORS published several special issues at the modest rate of about one per volume. These covered the wide spectrum of OR, from the technical (Current Simulation Research, Practical Developments in Mathematical Programming) to the applications-oriented (OR in Central Government, OR in Developing Countries). JORS was seemingly prescient, in the light of current headlines, with two adjacent special issues on Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems in Production Planning, Simulation and Scheduling. For special issues, I gratefully delegated my editorial responsibilities to Guest Editors and confined myself to shouting encouragement from the touchline as they attempted to herd cats. However, the production editing was never delegated, and the bundle of manuscripts eventually sent to the printers always met JORS production standards.

Papers which were not overtly theoretical or obvious case studies were classified as general papers. In this group, the role of information technology began to feature strongly, particularly Expert Systems and Artificial Intelligence. We also saw the emergence of papers which specifically championed the use of mini-computers as essential tools for OR workers. They were unfortunately lacking the software which routinely accompanies today’s laptops and, on reflection, were also lacking today’s laptops. When researching this piece from the archives, I was pleasantly surprised to find numerous papers on the best practices for “doing projects”: from Professional Presentation, Interviewing Skills, Evaluating Risk, Problem Structuring to Implementation. There are many more. There were also a number of “macro” papers which looked at much wider themes: A Better Scientific Theory of Human Organisations, OR at the Interface of Science, Engineering and Economics, OR Practice across the Hard-Soft Divide, OR as Technology, Beyond a System of Systems Methodologies. Also classified as a general paper was the Report of the Commission on the Future Practice of Operational Research. I recall that there was a strong emphasis on practice rather than theory and, in my eyes, this made it an excellent document. Did it result in significant lasting changes? It certainly forecast the increasing role of computing in all its manifestations, except possibly the emergence of Data Analytics.

JORS, and its progenitor ORQ, always took pride in the excellence of its case studies and, indeed, a major complaint from readers always referred to the small number in each issue, compared to the thousands of eligible projects that must have been implemented. I offer an obvious reason for this, which was also identified by my editorial forebears. All completed projects are potential case studies but, since JORS is a fully refereed publication, OR practitioners who have had the satisfaction of completing a successful project might not be comfortable with the perceived threat of having it judged as lacking in analytical purity or of little consequence in the great pantheon of OR. The project may have contained valuable lessons for OR folk and have been successfully implemented by overcoming the normal problems of messy data, shifting specifications, internal politics and traditional prejudices. These achievements may not be clear to expert referees, who are imagined—wrongly in my opinion—to reward only papers which have been re-polished in the antiseptic glare of perfect hindsight, rather like political autobiographies. I’m sure that this is not true, but the concerns were real. At some point, before my editorship, case studies were re-labelled as case-oriented papers. The reason for this was self-evident. ORQ had moved from being a quarterly, spent a few years as a semi-quarterly (eight issues/year) and eventually had become a monthly, when it was renamed JORS. The number of papers needed for well populated issues therefore increased significantly. The volume of submissions of technical papers rose smoothly to fill all of the available space but case studies required help. This help came in the form of a re-definition of what a case study might be. A paper which began with a request for help from a “customer” and proceeded, via problem-structuring debates, data collection and model formulation and testing, to an implemented solution ticked all of the boxes. A paper which started with a good idea for a model and then applied it to an existing problem or validated it on real data was considered to fall just within the case study definition. However, papers with a model formulation which, it was claimed, could provide a solution to a yet-to-be encountered, real problem were classified as “technical,” even if they were tested on trial data. Sometimes a referee would help a paper over the “case study hurdle” by encouraging the author to acquire “real data” for model validation. Referees such as this were considered to be invaluable and usually a “cookie” was hand-written on to their ragged index card (databases were a future delight) so that their dedication could be re-exploited. I always hoped for, but never received, a case study which honestly narrated a project’s story, from initial launch to implementation. Ideally, such a case study would also have reported on the post-implementation phase; a place where excellent projects have been known to founder on the rocks of mutating data, realigned priorities and wavering clients. I could have guaranteed to find good referees who shared my hopes, had such a paper ever appeared.

The emphasis throughout my editorship was on keeping the Journal relevant to its readership. In this regard I probably allowed my in-built bias towards “practitioners” to show, insofar as a good case study can provide excellent second-hand learning, especially if it is honest about the pitfalls as well as the successes. Authors of technical papers would obviously find it tedious to describe every rabbit hole explored before the final model emerged. However, I never overruled a referee’s acceptance of a paper of any type, nor did I ignore a clear rejection, unless the referee asked for a further opinion.

When I gave a speech at the JORS 40th Anniversary event in 1989 I revisited my thoughts and intentions from 1985. Very little appeared to have changed, despite my best intentions, although 12 healthy, well produced issues of JORS had appeared in every volume, mostly on time. Before claiming all credit, I must acknowledge the contribution made by the OR Society’s in-house Journal Production Editor, Marilyn Shaw. She efficiently managed a manuscript’s journey between author, referee, printer, publisher and Journal Editor in the pre-digital age. Her expertise and attention to detail ensured that each issue was fit for publication, and in doing so made my job so much easier, more satisfying and very rewarding.

All of my predecessors as Editor had written about the satisfaction they gained and tribulations endured, which mapped perfectly onto my own. I quote just a few of their words:

I would rather be a sea-captain than an editor. Tempests are unpleasant, but a sea-captain seldom experiences the chagrin of delivering passengers to a place where they no longer desire to go.

OR is a constructive, problem-solving activity, more akin to building roads than composing symphonies.

Too many so-called case histories read as if the authors believed in pre-destination and their own infallibility.

Often, papers that are written are not a true representation of the real contribution being made by the groups from which they emanate.

I eventually passed the editorship of JORS to Graham Rand with the hope that he would forgive my failings and in the certain knowledge that he would maintain the Journal’s role as a beacon of good OR.

3. Graham Rand’s reflections on being JORS Editor (1991–1996)

In his article “The challenge of publications” former editor Brian Haley (2010) stated that “the tenure of Graham Rand (University of Lancaster) from 1991 was to be a period of consolidation for the Society and steady and successful progress for the various journals.” That’s good to know.

I was asked to be editor during the IFORS Conference in Athens in 1990, for which I was the programme committee chair. That had, of course, been a major task for the previous two years. Perhaps the ORS grandees who approached me thought I would now have time on my hands. I had been a member of the Society’s Publications Committee since 1974, just a few years after I joined the Society, so I suppose they knew what they were in for. However, I was also a member of the Society’s Council and Chair of the North-West Operational Research Group and had been editing the IFORS journal International Abstracts in Operations Research (IAOR) since 1979. Nevertheless, I accepted the responsibility, and was able to pass the editorship of IAOR to my good friend David Smith (University of Exeter) at the end of 1991. My editorial burden was eased when Tony Christer (University of Salford) and Roger Hartley (University of Keele) agreed to be associate editors, helping to deal with the increase in papers submitted by academics as a result of the beginning of the Research Assessment Exercises.

For a variety of reasons, the publication dates of JORS issues were behind schedule when I took over. I was pleased that the efforts of the editorial team soon rectified this. In my first editorial I wrote that

it is traditional for a new editor to set out all the changes that will be introduced in order to make the Journal even better. I intend to take this opportunity to refrain from being traditional. The same policies will be followed, in regard to content, to the refereeing process and to the quality of the Journal. For instance, the journal of a society whose practitioner members are in the majority should have an emphasis on well-presented descriptions of significant work that has actually been done.

In each of the years my predecessor, John Hough, was Editor, over 40% of the papers were case studies. Those were the days! I went on to say that “many referees have not responded as quickly as they might, and so have introduced considerable and unacceptable delays in the editorial process…. Referees are asked to remember the Golden Rule, ‘Referee for others as you would have them referee for you,’ particularly in regard to length of time of response”. Plus ça change.

What were the highlights? Let me mention just one. The application of OR to sports was beginning to be a relatively trending topic. As a keen sports fan, that pleased me. When the Society decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of JORS, editors were asked to choose significant papers from their time in office and write a commentary. One of my choices was: Scheduling English cricket umpires (Wright, 1991). In the commentary (Rand, 2000), I wrote that of the papers I received concerning cricket

several needed to be rejected, including one that demonstrated how to choose the Indian cricket team using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. A wise decision, or so I thought until England visited the sub-continent the following winter and were soundly beaten. However, one stream of papers, represented by this month’s anniversary paper, was a pleasure to read and to publish. The fact that it emanated from an office a few doors down the corridor from my own was irrelevant. I found them fascinating to read, because of the context. It was also clear that they were pushing forward the application of relatively new combinatorial optimisation techniques such as simulated annealing and tabu search. The first paper, reproduced with this issue, deals with the initial problem Mike Wright tackled for the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB). Mike had heard about the ‘TCCB employee who used to shut himself away in virtual hermetic seclusion for three or four weeks in January and February each year.’ Fixtures and umpires needed to be scheduled, and Mike volunteered to tackle this. To try him out the TCCB asked him to start with scheduling the umpires. His paper is full of fascinating details, for the cricket afficionado. In conversation with Mike I learnt about others, which could not be included in the paper, to prevent potential libel problems.

It appears that the most cited article during my term as editor was by Doyle and Green (1994). They examined cross-efficiency in Data Envelopment Analysis. A theoretical paper, but from my perspective enhanced by the last sentence of the abstract: “Finally, we suggest practical uses for cross-efficiency, illustrated with reference to the same data set.” Maybe that doesn’t meet the desired example of implemented work, but it does acknowledge that OR is meant to have practical relevance.

Having completed my stint as editor I handed on to John Ranyard, a good friend then and, perhaps surprisingly given his surprise at the amount of work involved, now.

4. John Ranyard reflections: (1997–2001)

I was originally offered the role of editor of JORS in 1990, as a “reward” for being President of ORS in 1988/9 but I was then still working full time in British Coal OR and I decided that it would be too burdensome. When it was offered again in 1995, I had left British Coal, after 29 years as a practitioner/OR Manager and had taken on the role of External Liaison Manager for the Management Science department at Lancaster University. This time I accepted on the basis that I would receive some payment for my services, as I was at the time a hungry independent consultant. (I felt confident in requesting this as the income from our new publisher, MacMillan Press, had increased from £10k pa from Pergamon Press to a minimum of £100k pa during my Presidency). This was agreed by the ORS Publications committee.

My predecessor, Graham Rand let me shadow him for the 1996 volume, during which time I realised that I would need support, particularly as my maths was, and is, quite weak (A level only). I therefore invited John Wilson (optimisation) and Terry Williams (a portfolio including project management, risk and forecasting) to become Assistant Editors, covering around 20% of submissions.

After a few months I found there were many machine scheduling and inventory control papers being submitted, which often seemed to me to be clever solutions to problems that didn’t really exist in the real world. I therefore invited Chris Potts to sift the former papers and Roy Johnston the latter and advise on which were suitable to send to referees. I labelled those that were accepted for publication as Technical Notes (with hindsight, this may have been unfair to those authors who had made an important development in their field). Finally, Christine Faulkner, permanent Editorial Assistant and based in the ORS office in Birmingham, completed the team—I valued her experience and good humour e.g. “answers on a postcard please”—when we were discussing a particularly knotty problem! Sadly, she is no longer with us.

I also inherited an International Advisory Board to support the Journal and to advise on policy. I refreshed the membership by including some of my own contacts and arranged lunch meetings at conferences, which I found helpful.

I was the last editor to use the largely paper/post based editorial system and it seemed to me most efficient if I spent one day per week in the ORS office. Also, I valued the social contact. So, I would leave home in Sheffield (later Bamford) at around 6.30am on that day to catch the 7.15am train from Chesterfield to Birmingham, so as to be in the office by 8.30am, returning on the 4 pm train (mostly asleep) to arrive home at around 6 pm, a full day!

The job

Looking back, this was the most difficult job I have ever had and given that I regarded myself a career practitioner at that time, I was unprepared for some aspects. It may be a cliché, but I often found that authors expected their papers to be published and of course referees expected their recommendations to be accepted. However, it was not unusual for one referee to recommend publication in just a few sentences, whilst the other provided three pages on why it should not be published and/or how it could be improved! So, a third referee had to be employed or—heaven forbid—I had to read the paper myself and make a judgement! I was also unprepared for disgruntled authors challenging me at conferences over my decision to reject their paper. Early on I became engaged in a 40-minute argument with one author and after that I realised that a swift brush off was the only viable option.

Whilst a major task in my role at Lancaster was setting up projects in industry for OR master’s students, I was encouraged to carry out some research into the management of OR groups with Professor Robert Fildes, which was sponsored by the OR Society (The Success and Survival of OR Groups in the UK). The resulting papers describing the outcome of our work were most appropriately placed in JORS and came to fruition during my editorship. Thus, I probably published more of my own papers than any previous editor although I did not, of course, take any part in the refereeing process!

I decided to include an editorial in the January issue of each volume, something that previous editors might also have done. I have looked at my first one, January 1997, and last one, December 2001, in preparing these reflections.

When I took over, I believed that it was possible to publish more case studies (as had previous editors) but of course an editor can only publish from papers that are submitted and very few were. In fact, only two unsolicited papers from practitioners were submitted voluntarily during my time, although a fair number were submitted by partnerships of practitioners and academics. However, a greater number of submissions could be labelled “case-oriented” in that they used real data to demonstrate that significant improvements could be made in the real world. I believe that around 25% of the papers that I published were “case-oriented.”

Viewpoints, which enabled readers to comment on published papers, were an important feature during my editorship. My recollection is that they were of two types: genuine alternative points of view or comments on aspects of a paper by disgruntled referees because their criticisms had not been accepted. The latter were easily spotted because their viewpoint would be published in the same issue as the relevant paper. The author would respond in the same issue and usually that would be it. The other type would be submitted after the paper was published and would be sent on to the author for a response. This response would be sent back to the view-pointer, who might decide to respond further! Given that the the editorial and publishing processes were paper and post based at the time and even if such exchanges were limited to two rounds, it could easily take over a year for some viewpoints to be completed.

Two memorable incidents

Rankings of Journals by paper citations are published annually and when I took over in 1997 JORS was comfortably in the top 10 of OR journals published outside the USA and third of the broad-based journals. This continued for a couple of years but then suddenly our ranking dropped to 24th place, which I found both puzzling and alarming: naturally I feared that I had caused this! Of course, these statistics don’t tell you everything about a journal but do influence authors about where to submit their work. So, I persuaded our publishers, MacMillan, to purchase additional data to try to find out what had changed. My recollection is that we failed to find out any specific major cause but to my great relief our ranking shot up to 11th the following year.

Secondly, a paper was submitted that claimed to significantly reduce the time needed to solve an LP, from a near exponential rate of increase as the size of the problem increases to a linear rate of increase, a massive improvement. For a weekend I basked in the potential glory of being the editor who published this dramatic development! However, topic advisor John Wilson was suspicious and quickly enlisted a referee, who spotted a flaw in the author’s logic, namely that some assumptions were not valid. The author accepted this feedback and withdrew the paper. A general solution still remains illusory.

Finally, I was editor when JORS celebrated its 50th anniversary, the first OR journal to do so. I was aware of the significance of this milestone and together with the publications committee, I helped to organise several events and activities to commemorate this:

• A gold emblem on the cover of each issue of volume 51, with the slogan “1950–2000 Jubilee Year: the World’s Oldest Established OR Journal”.

• Reproductions of classic papers from previous years, including the very first one by Lord Blackett, one in each issue. These were chosen by the editorial team, previous editors and prominent members of the OR community.

• An article in MS/OR Today (Ranyard, 2000).

• And (most importantly), a celebratory lunch for all editors, documented in the OR Newsletter (Cummins, 2000).

Final reflections

As mentioned above, I was disappointed at the lack of case study submissions to JORS (common to other OR journals too) that demonstrated the impact of OR in securing significant improvements in the real world. It seemed to me that editors had to value technical improvements in known problem areas above all else, even if some of the problems did not exist in the real world. I did, however, stimulate a discussion of and revision to the guidelines for submitting practice-oriented papers. Also, I introduced a requirement for all authors to submit a statement summarising the contribution of their paper to both the theory and practice of OR.

Subsequently Robert Fildes and I carried out further research into OR practice, this time sponsored by IFORS (Ranyard et al., 2013), one strand of which focused on this issue. Surprisingly, at least to us, the editor of ITOR, which is published by IFORS, refused to consider our final report for publication as it did not conform to their editorial guidelines! Instead, after some refocusing, it was published in EJOR (Ranyard et al., 2015). Subsequently we published a series of articles in Inside OR in 2016 based on the EJOR paper, one of which summarised our conclusions on this issue (Ranyard & Fildes, 2016), which has become known as the “natural drift”—the gap between academic research and the practical needs of organisations and in particular how this is fuelled by publications in academic journals. In short, we believe that OR research should have the aim of enabling improvements in the real world, either in the long term by new theoretical development or in the shorter term by applications where new methods are needed or existing ones tweaked in order to address practical problems. We also observed that much published OR research is devoted to niche areas and is not only impenetrable to practitioners but also to other potentially interested audiences outside the domain.

We proposed that the Society should take the lead in enabling a wider understanding of OR research in its own publications, initially by some simple changes:

• Asking authors to produce two abstracts, one aimed at those currently researching in the problem domain area (current practice) and a more general one for all other readers.

• Asking authors to discuss how their research could contribute to solving problems in the real world.

• Encouraging editors and referees to change the titles of papers and/or keywords to enable a wider understanding of the contents.

• Asking authors to discuss implementation issues or to discuss the question of diffusion of the research described.

We hoped that reporting our concerns in Inside OR would lead to a wider understanding of our views and an ongoing debate. When this did not occur, we made recommendations to the ORS publications committee in 2017 on how such simple changes to the guidance to authors could help to reduce the natural drift. Sadly, to us, the publications committee decided to take no action.

5. Terry Williams and John Wilson reflection (2002–2010)

When we heard that John Ranyard would be stepping down from the editorship of JORS, we each applied independently for the position of editor. We felt we knew something of what would be required of us if we were offered the position of editor and were enjoying helping John as two Associate Editors. However, one of us became aware that the other had applied and that we were the only two candidates. A telephone conversation took place where the candidate with the knowledge asked the other if he was interested in making a joint application to working together as editors. This seemed a good idea as we were aware that John Ranyard had been kept very busy with all the editorship tasks and that we as full-time university staff were already busy people but might cope well with having nearer to a 50% load of the editorial tasks rather than the full 100%. We roughed together some ideas about how we could operate as a team and how we could make a case to the selection panel. We had both been given separate interview times, but on the same day, so we agreed to meet up immediately before arriving at the OR Society office and finalise a plan of action ready to put to the panel. As always in the best OR projects things do not go smoothly from start to finish and one of us was delayed by late running trains to the Birmingham home of the OR Society and we only had a chance to meet moments before the first one of us was due to be interviewed. On arrival we asked if we could both meet the panel together and stated that we would like to make the case for working as joint editors. The panel members told us that they themselves had been thinking over the possibility of a joint editorship but could not form a clear view of the way this could work. Presumably they liked what they heard from us as we were offered the positions of joint editors.

Because we had different interests and expertise in the field of OR we were able to allocate responsibility for handling each paper (i.e. the decision whether to have it refereed, the choice of referees and the ultimate decision on the fate of the paper) to one or other joint-editor. We also made some decisions on tasks that each joint-editor could take on for 6 months in turn (e.g. putting journal issues together ready for publication and deciding to which joint-editor to allocate a paper as soon as a pile of incoming papers started to build up). Splitting the tasks worked well, but we did nearly come unstuck in the early days when after our first six issues the stock of manuscripts accepted for publication began to dry up. With a bit of fast footwork we chased a few authors of nearly-ready manuscripts to get them to finalise revisions and the next few issues were not delayed (but only just!), but we were conscious that variations in the flow of manuscripts might jeopardise publication of future issues. However, the recently introduced online submission system seemed to encourage more authors to submit papers (not always of the quality we wanted!) and we belatedly realised we were moving from a situation of famine to one of a flood of papers, which brought its own problems.

We had been keen to see an online submission system introduced, but did not like those favoured by our publishers as they lacked the flexibility and features we were used to in the manual system. Accordingly, the OR Society commissioned a purpose-built system. This brought its own problems, as the useful features were sometimes outweighed by glitches. Having all papers on a system also assisted us working together, but at a distance, and clearly much could also be gained with occasional face-to-face meetings and frequent use of email and the telephone, so the system of working as joint editors soon developed a pleasing rhythm.

Because we were acting as joint editors we felt it would be unwise to also have associate editors to help us as it would add too many dimensions to decision making. Whether this was a good idea is slightly unclear. It was helpful not to have to rely on others in our early days as editors but might have helped in the later years of our editorship when we could have spread the workload. However, we felt pleased that the idea of joint editorship worked and gave a starting point for other teams to follow. (Even with just the two of us we occasionally found that people confused us. We had similar initials and some authors had to be told by OR Society staff that “the editor with the Scottish accent works in England and vice versa”!)

From the outset we hoped to encourage more papers from practitioners. It did not always prove easy to encourage this pro bono activity. We felt that such papers reflected well on practitioners and displayed their work to an interested audience. To this end we encouraged people at OR conferences, who had presented interesting talks on projects they had led, to write up their projects for the journal. Unfortunately, there was often quite a delay and when we received the papers, suggestions, albeit often gentle and encouraging, that we and referees made about improvements needed to make a paper of publishable quality, were not always received well by practitioner authors. Often all we were asking for was some rethinking and rewriting that could be done on a wet Saturday afternoon (which was often the time when we would be working on the journal). Sometimes this was thought to be unreasonable and many months would go by before any revised paper came back to us, if at all. (One of us is reminded of being asked for the first time to referee a paper by the editor of a US journal and being told to expect to do “an evening’s work” on the task. The expectation of when the work should be done was made quite clear.)

At the heart of our intentions was to maintain JORS as the main journal in the world which aimed to publish OR papers which were rigorous and sound, but also motivated by real-world problems and with real-world application. It was easy to reject papers that were not academically sound, but we also rejected papers that appeared divorced from anything useful. In this, we were trying to fill a gap left particularly by US journals at that time, which tended to consist of papers which were theoretically sound (but sometimes unclear as to their relevance) or consist of real-world applications which did not noticeably extend the theory or practice of OR. One consequence of this was to maintain, or maybe increase, the number of papers that could be described as having elements of “soft” OR, and papers sometimes spanning soft problem-structuring with hard modelling.

Apart from the help that one joint editor could give another, we also benefited from help from the OR Society staff, its Publications Committee, the publishers of the journal (in those days Palgrave) and occasional helpful advice from people we came to know from attending international conferences who themselves had knowledge and experience from other journals. In particular, we should pay tribute to the help we received from the Editorial Assistants, first Christine Faulkner then Sarah Parry.

We looked at the most cited papers in the period of our editorship—specifically the ten most cited papers and a heavily-overlapping list of the ten most recently cited papers. No author appeared more than once. The most cited paper (by some way) was on Humanitarian Aid Logistics by Luk Van Wassenhove (Google Scholar currently showing 2100 citations and still heavily cited); there was also a paper on transportation planning in disaster response, perhaps showing a concern in this application area. There were important papers in specific applications: specifically credit-scoring, vehicle routing heuristics, simulated annealing and papers on data envelopment analysis. Representing the comment above on hard/soft papers, there were papers on group model building for problem structuring/decision support, and conceptual modelling for simulation (a series of two papers, an innovation for JORS itself we believe, by Stewart Robinson). In addition, some evergreen subjects were represented too: exponential smoothing, demand forecasting, papers on the economic order quantity and the categorization of demand patterns.

When we started editing, the OR Society only published two academic journals: JORS and the European Journal of Information Systems (already over a decade old then). The decision was taken around that time to start Knowledge Management and Research in Practice. Both of these journals were felt to be in areas distinct from JORS. However, as our editorship went on, proposals started to initiate new journals with specific remits that overlapped with JORS. The Journal of Simulation duly had its first edition in 2006, and Health Systems after our tenure, in 2012. Both journals have since done well, and other journals followed later. There were concerns at the time, particularly in Terry’s case, that these articles would cannibalise JORS, particularly taking away the case-oriented paper that every editor here has been saying is so important for JORS—many of the papers in the Journal of Simulation and Health Systems would have been welcome in JORS—but it is perhaps impossible to judge the effect on JORS. JORS is still the main journal of ORS, and last year JORS published 42% of papers published in ORS journals.

When we started out working on the process of publishing journal papers we were bringing into print papers that might help tell a readership what OR is and why it is a “good thing.” We hope that we achieved at least part of that goal. However, we are aware that we were providing only steps along the path and much more was achieved in publicising OR during the Covid-19 outbreak when the UK population could view comments on the television and in the quality newspapers regarding the progress of the pandemic being made lucidly by a person whose job title had “Operational Research” in it.

6. Thomas W Archibald and Jonathan Crook reflections (2010–2019)

We took on the role of joint Editors of JORS on 1 January 2010 and remained in place until 2019. This was a slightly daunting task in the light of the great success of our predecessors. However, they kindly spent time with us to show us the processes to be followed to make our period a success. Terry Williams remained an Editor until 31 May 2010 and John Wilson saw through papers already in the system until 31 December 2010. When we took over the then publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, had just introduced a new submission system that was considerably more efficient than its predecessor. This proved essential as the number of submissions rapidly increased. In the calendar year 2010 we received 537 new submissions, in 2015 it was 637 and by 2019 it was 1026. All submissions were looked at by the Editors and the vast majority handled by the Editors themselves, from making the initial desk reject decision to the selection and communications with referees to decisions on each resubmission.

During our tenure the publishers, ourselves and the Society continuously adopted new processes to enable the rapid increase in scale of the journal and we strived to increase the efficiency with which papers were handled whilst at the same time maintaining or enhancing the quality of feedback to authors and appropriateness of the decisions made. This involved many things: including new admin arrangements, improved journal systems, larger pools of referees and the introduction of Associate Editors. The latter was a departure in editorial policy for JORS, but of course was commonplace in other journals including titles within the Society’s portfolio. Previously, the editors handled the reviews of all papers with the exception of viewpoints, book reviews and special issue papers. The appointment of Associate Editors broadened the range of expertise of the Editorial Team as well as adding capacity to handle reviews speedily. We worked with 14 Associate Editors in total. Graham Kendall and Mike Pidd joined at the outset in 2010. We welcomed Gilbert Laporte to the team in 2011 and Lixin Tang, Ahmed Ghoniem, Antuela Tako and Joe Zhu joined between 2015 and 2017. In our final year Vincent Charles, Richard Weber, Kaisa Miettinen, Lu Zhen, Alper Sen, Blanca Perez-Gladish and Haitao Li also came aboard. We are very grateful to all for their dedication and hard work in dealing with increasing numbers of papers. Aris Syntetos handled Viewpoints throughout our tenure. Of course, the operation of a journal like JORS involves many other people from the publishers and the Society—too many to name, but we would like to thank Gavin Blackett for his enduring support.

In 2018, publication of the journal was transferred from Palgrave Macmillan to Taylor and Francis and we moved onto another new manuscript management system, ScholarOne. The new system proved to be a game-changer with respect to the selection of potential referees by providing a list of suggested referees gleaned from the Web of Science database. Prior to this we relied on manual searches of the JORS reviewer database, Web of Science, Google Scholar and other internet sources. The system also came with an array of tools for monitoring the progress of manuscripts and prompted editors with numerous emailed notifications (some of which we admit we turned off because of information overload!).

We must mention Publications Committee meetings at the Society’s offices in Birmingham at which Editors of each of the Society’s journals presented quarterly reports. These were a mixture of receiving congratulations, expectations management (on our part!), receiving wise advice and forcing us to engage in self -assessment, all with a dose of good humour. These meetings were vitally important and very helpful indeed for us.

During our tenure, we were highly conscious of the impact factor (IF) of the journal. Of course, there are many reasons why a journal’s IF is not perfectly correlated with the quality of papers published in the journal and many universities subscribe to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) whereby journal-based metrics such as IFs should not be taken as the sole indicator of the quality of a person’s work. Nevertheless, one might suspect that the IF of a journal affects the number and quality of submissions. The IF of JORS rose during our period from 0.971 in 2011 (citations in 2011 of papers published in 2009 and 2010) to 2.860 in 2020.¹ We were also highly conscious of the history of JORS and of its exceptional reputation and of course, we strove to enhance this further.

We noticed a number of trends over the decade. For example, changes in the distribution of countries where authors were based. This may be evidenced by comparing the distribution of origin of the first author of papers in 2011 and 2020. In 2011 16.9% were in the US, 5.8% in China, 23.4% in the UK, 5.2% in Canada, 16.9% in the rest of Europe and 31.8% elsewhere in the world. In 2020 the distribution was: 11.3% in the US, 27.4% in China, 16.1% in the UK, 4.0% in Canada, 10.5% in the rest of Europe and 30.6% elsewhere in the world. Clearly, the proportion of first authors in China increased considerably whilst the proportions in the US, UK, Canada and the rest of Europe decreased.

There is a temptation to highlight certain papers, but we are not going to do this. Multiple criteria exist. One might think of the number of citations but this depends on when the paper was published, how many people read the journal and work in the same area and many other factors as well as the quality of the contribution. However, we noticed certain areas developing rapidly in terms of numbers of papers during our tenure, for example papers in the areas of data analytics and machine learning, also DEA, credit scoring, and supply chains.

We passed on the role at different times: Jonathan in March 2019 because of a huge increase in administrative responsibility in the University of Edinburgh Business School and Tom when his tenure finished at the end of 2019. Four Editors supported by twenty-eight Associate Editors replaced us! We learned a huge amount while editing JORS. First is the value of referees who give tirelessly of their time and expertise to evaluate many submissions, often multiple times and without whom the journal in the form we know it would not be possible. We are most grateful to all of them. Second, when we sometimes do not receive a decision on our own submissions (to any journal, not just JORS) as quickly as we hoped we have a better understanding of the many reasons, often very good reasons unconnected to the quality of the paper, why that might be the case. Third, we found it very helpful to be colleagues in the same School, which facilitated communication, discussion and decision-making.

We very much enjoyed our time as Editors of JORS and we would strongly encourage others to put themselves forward for this role in the future.

7. Up to now: John Boylan^†, Martin H Kunc, Said Salhi and Zhe George Zhang reflections (2020–)

^†Before starting our review, we would like to acknowledge our colleague John Boylan, who passed away on July 7, 2023. It was a terrible shock to all of us. John was leading multiple activities related to the celebration of the 75th anniversary of JORS. John has been a thoughtful, patient, and full of energy co-editor. We will miss him terribly and God bless him.

As the current editors of JORS, we feel greatly honoured to lead the journal in its 75th volume, the first OR journal to reach this three-quarter century milestone.

Thanks to the excellent leadership from Tom Archibald and Jonathan Crook, we took over a journal that was in very good health. We also thank Tom for his advice and support during the handover period and managing the legacy of papers from his tenure. Since the volume of submissions has grown substantially in recent years, and reached about 1115 submissions for 2022, which is 42% of all submissions to the journals in the portfolio of the OR Society, the number of editors-in-chief grew from two to four, as well as an increase in the number of associate editors (AEs). Our areas of expertise complement each other, and our research circles are also relatively diverse, allowing us to approach and appoint new AEs from various areas, culture and regions.

In the 2019 volume, JORS published 159 articles and has grown to publish 180 articles in the 2022 volume. This growth has created a truly global journal with a good balance across regions in terms of authors and citations. For instance, in 2009 half of the papers originated from Europe with another quarter from North America, followed by a fifth from Asia. This spread changed in recent years where in 2019 nearly a third came from Asia and Europe followed by 17% from North America. Recently in 2022, Asia increased its share by over 40% while Europe and North America reduced theirs accordingly, with the rest remaining more or less unchanged. See Table 1 with bold showing the region with the largest share.

Table 1. Location of authors of JORS papers.

Location	2009	2019	2022
Europe	47.6%	36.5%	32.7%
North America	22.6%	30.6%	13.4%
Asia	18.5%	16.9%	43.3%
Latin America	4.5%	9.0%	4.1%
Middle East	3.4%	4.3%	3.7%
Australasia	2.6%	2.0%	1.8%
Africa	0.8%	0.7%	0.9%

The increasing flow of papers requires reviewers and editors to make difficult decisions, but it will ultimately lead to the continuous growth in terms of quality and positioning of the journal. Definitively, we are facing different challenges than our predecessors: pressures from publish or perish have increased the number of articles and requests for special issues; pressures from journal lists have impacted on paying attention to journal rankings, citations and other “politics of academia” and increasing competition from open source journals. We can say the type of articles are fairly different than our predecessors with less case studies and practice of OR and more mathematical and theoretical papers. Definitively, there are many trends and uncertainty that can influence how JORS will face its future until its 100th year.

As new editors, we found areas for refinement and improvement to sustain the recent success and build up for future growth. We renewed the International Advisory Board to cover the global spread of the international OR community. We appointed further Associate Editors from the international operational research community, doubling the number from 14 to 28 and improving the female to male ratio to 39:61. Besides, this will help to manage the high volume of submissions in a timely manner, it does provide the journal with a wider research spectrum. Moreover, we implemented a new policy on rejecting unsolicited special issues to keep the publications of regular papers also in a timely manner. In addition, we have also now made the journal double blind to give extra credibility to enhance further the already high standard of the journal. Two interesting initiatives have also started to be implemented, one refers to the submission of one or two discussion papers a year focussing on open areas, and the other on critical reviews that are carried out by experts in contemporary topics.

We are also proud to mention that JORS is the only OR journal with rankings in six categories by Scimago Journal Rank. This is a good indication of the multiple disciplines that we cover in JORS and the strong support for multi- and inter-disciplinary research. JORS covers both Soft OR in categories such as Management Information Systems, Marketing, and Strategy and Management, and Hard OR in categories such as Management Science and Operations Research, Modelling and Simulation, and Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty. In terms of the Journal’s impact factor, it also shows an upward trajectory. JORS is ranked Q1 in the Management Science and Operations Research (MS&OR) in 2022. The last time JORS was Q1 in this category was 2017. In terms of impact factor, JORS was the journal with the second highest growth in terms of impact factor in 2022, 18%, reaching 3.6 among the 20 mainstream MS&OR journals.

Since OR is the science of better, we believe all papers published in the Journal should have a strong practical focus with rigour and innovative ideas embedded. This provides thoughtful reflection on any aspect of the application of the multiple OR methodologies, as Figure 1 shows.

Figure 1. Word cloud associated with JORS papers.

One important aspect for prospective authors is to have a clear understanding of how their papers contribute to the recent debates published in JORS. We want to build up a community of scholars where everyone enriches the debates in the journal as well as in other related journals.

We greatly appreciate the large number of people who contribute in many different ways to help make the Journal a success. We thank our former Editorial Assistant, Mandy Blackett, and the newly appointed Sean Raney, who liaises with authors and reviewers, and Carol McLaughlin, Research and Publications Officer, for her support coordinating our activities. Our special thanks to the staff at our publisher, Taylor & Francis, particularly Richard Goodman, who provides insightful information and promotes the journal, and copy editors for the speed on having the accepted papers available online.

Finally, we thank the pillars of the Journal: authors, reviewers and readers. The success of JORS will not be possible without them. Please, keep making JORS a great journal!!

8. Conclusion

Through the last 40 years the journal has grown from strength to strength encompassing new challenges, embracing new research topics and embedding diversity in its people in terms of gender, colour, countries, religious and culture. As highlighted through the reflections of our hard working past and present editors, we are confident that the journal, alongside the OR Society portfolio of journals, will continue to grow and remain to be one of the highly recognised and used journals in the area of Operational Research that we all enjoy.

Notes

1 https:/jcr.clarivate.com/jcr/browse–journals accessed 11.5.23. Note there was a lag of up to a year between the time of acceptance and the date of publication in paper form.