Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Business Analytics!
We are delighted to launch the Journal of Business Analytics. Our goal in launching this new journal is to provide a top tier publication outlet that covers the latest research in the rapidly growing field of Business Analytics. Business Analytics research focuses on developing new insights and holistic understanding of an organisation’s business environment, to help make timely and accurate decisions, to survive, innovate and grow. Thus, Business Analytics focuses on the full spectrum of descriptive/diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics as well as computational experiments to solve seemingly unsolvable, complex real world problems. There are many good academic journals that publish research on variants of Business Analytics such as big data, data science, and related topics in information systems, operations research, and computer science. However, they all tend to publish only a subset of research in the area of Business Analytics and have only recently started to attract papers in this area. Our goal is to introduce the Journal of Business Analytics as the primary outlet for Business Analytics research outcomes.
We would like to publish articles that use real world data to solve real world problems in a creative and innovative manner. We solicit articles that specifically address an interesting research problem, collect and/or repurpose multiple types of data sets, develop and evaluate methods and methodologies to solve the problem in a new and novel way. We want researchers to think beyond just applying traditional statistical or machine learning methods. Papers submitted to the journal need to address how they identify an existing or new real world problem, develop new methods that may, for instance, combine machine learning with statistics, optimisation, and/or network science, and assess these methods using sound methodologies and/or field experiments to empirically evaluate the solution.
Our first issue showcases several invited papers that address different aspects of business analytics. The first paper by Delen and Ram lays out a research agenda for Business Analytics. The second paper by Qin et al. uses a natural experiment and econometric techniques to examine the substitution effects of a newly introduced bike sharing programme on an existing ride sharing service. The third paper by Chaterjee et al. studies a very contemporary and important problem, namely, distinguishing facts from opinions in social media text. It develops a deep learning method that combines multiple features to classify facts and opinions on Twitter and empirically validates the method. The fourth paper by Power et al., examines the definition of Business Analytics using an interesting empirical research methodology. The fifth paper by Tao et al. addresses a question in financial analytics using a deep learning method to identify forward looking statements and understand their relationship to stock market pricing pre and post IPO.
Together, the papers in this inaugural issue cover an important portion of the wide spectrum of Business Analytics. We hope you enjoy reading this first issue and we invite contributions from you and your colleagues to subsequent issues of JBA. We intend for this journal to be the place to find the latest research on Business Analytics. By having a thorough yet fast turnaround, we aim to publish papers and showcase research that is very contemporary and impactful.