{"id":1134,"date":"2010-05-07T12:04:24","date_gmt":"2010-05-07T16:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2010-05-07T12:04:24","modified_gmt":"2010-05-07T16:04:24","slug":"culling-journals-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/05\/07\/culling-journals-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Culling Journals Time!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is that time of the year when our librarian asks us to consider whether or not to continue subscribing to journals.\u00a0 In the past, journals have been identified by “percentage increase” with the idea that those whose increase is high need special attention to determine if they are still valuable.\u00a0 This assumes that we had made good decisions in the past:\u00a0 if a “bad” journal keeps its increase low enough, it doesn’t show up on the radar screen.\u00a0 A low priced, but valuable journal with a “big” one-time increase gets special scrutiny.\u00a0 But which should get more attention: a journal going up $60 on a base of $600 or an equivalent quality journal going up $200 on a base of $5000?\u00a0 Ordering by percentage increase means the first gets much more attention but rational budgeting suggests looking carefully at the second.\u00a0 While those values seem extreme, that is roughly what happens when comparing Management Science<\/em> (as the “inexpensive” journal) and European Journal of Operational Research<\/em> (whose price to Carnegie Mellon is $5885 per year).<\/p>\n

This year, our librarian simply listed all journals above $500 and asked us to look those over.\u00a0 Here are the ones in operations research\/operations management we are considering:<\/p>\n

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH\t $8,615
\nEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH\t$5,855
\nJOURNAL OF THE OPERATIONAL RESEARCH SOCIETY\t$1,840
\nCOMPUTATIONAL OPTIMIZATION AND APPLICATIONS\t$1,166
\nZEITSCHRIFT FUR OPERATIONS RESEARCH aka Mathematical Methods of Operations Research\t$898
\nOPERATIONS RESEARCH LETTERS\t$815
\nJOURNAL OF OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT\t$637<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The INFORMS journals<\/a> don’t make the list since the bundled rate puts them under $500\/journal.<\/p>\n

What to do with these?\u00a0 Fortunately, I have already done some checking on journal influence and pricing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with the first journal listed above: “International Journal of Production Research”<\/a> (Taylor and Francis). If we take a “cost per eigenfactor”<\/a> value, that journal ranks 39th in the “Operations Research” ranking.\u00a0 I have never considered publishing in the journal, so I don’t know much about it.\u00a0 It does publish a lot of articles (24 issues per year, with around 15-20 articles per issue).\u00a0 I recognize a couple of names on its editorial board.\u00a0 Harzing’s indispensable Publish or Perish<\/a> shows that it has a fair number of papers published with 100+ google scholar cites.\u00a0 Overall, not a bad or junk journal, but for $8615, I would want much more.\u00a0 So I would be biased towards dropping, but will bow to my colleagues in operations management on how they feel.\u00a0 Near as I can tell, none of them have published in the journal either, so that might be a good one to cut.<\/p>\n

European Journal of Operational Research<\/em><\/a> (Elsevier) is a difficult one for me.\u00a0 I have published two papers there recently, and it is a key outlet in operations research.\u00a0 Since they publish many papers (24 issues\/year times perhaps 25\u00a0 papers per issue), the journal is important to our field.\u00a0 Going through the same steps as above, the journal is 12th in cost per eigenfactor, number 1 in overall eigenfactor,I certainly know and admire much of the editorial board, there are many papers above 100 cites.\u00a0 I’m not crazy about a $5855 cost, but I think we are stuck paying it.<\/p>\n

Journal of the Operational Research Society<\/a> <\/em>(Palgrave) would be a hard one for me to cut.\u00a0 Sometimes it veers off in directions I am not crazy about (the dreaded “soft OR” versus “hard OR” debate) but it offers a nice mix of theory and application, along with the odd interesting historical piece.\u00a0 Number 15 on the cost\/eigenfactor, I think it is safe.<\/p>\n

Computational Optimization and Applications<\/em><\/a> (Springer) is a journal I have published once in, and is part of the discussion when trying to place some of my work.\u00a0 It is down the list at 25th in cost\/eigenvector, but has an admirable board.\u00a0 Not a huge number of papers with 100+ cites (14 in my search), but pretty reasonable.\u00a0 I think it is OK.<\/p>\n

Zeitschrift fuer Operations Research (Mathematical Methods of Operations Research)<\/em><\/a> (Springer) has a long history, going back to the days when it made sense to talk about a country’s operations research journals.\u00a0 But, like “operations research” groups in Fortune 500 companies, country-oriented OR journals are finding it hard to compete.\u00a0 In fact, I am finding it hard to parse out exactly what the history is here, but this appears to be the combination of a couple different journals.\u00a0 In any case, at 28 in the cost\/eigenvector listing, it is clear it needs more papers like “Modeling of Extremal Events in Insurance and Finance” by Embrechts and Schmidli (1994) (at an impressive 2051 google cites) if it is going to survive.\u00a0 So keep for now, but give it a stern eye.<\/p>\n

OR Letters<\/a> <\/em>(Elsevier) is a natural keep at number 9 in the cost\/eigenvector listing.\u00a0 It is as close as we get to the rapid publication system that works so well in portions of computer science through their competitive conference publication system.<\/p>\n

Journal of Operations Management<\/a> <\/em>(Elsevier) at number 10 in the cost\/eigenvector listing, and a Financial Times<\/em> journal<\/a> to boot (meaning it is used to gauge research impact in the Financial Times<\/em> ranking of business schools) is also a natural keep.<\/p>\n

OK, there you have it:\u00a0 I would toss out the International Journal of Production Research<\/em> on the basis of stupid pricing but keep the rest. \u00a0 We’ll see if my colleagues vote to keep it around for another year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is that time of the year when our librarian asks us to consider whether or not to continue subscribing to journals.\u00a0 In the past, journals have been identified by “percentage increase” with the idea that those whose increase is high need special attention to determine if they are still valuable.\u00a0 This assumes that we … Continue reading “Culling Journals Time!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journals"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}