I have mixed feelings about things like journal impact studies.\u00a0 Once a ranking is announced, forces come in to play to game the ranking.\u00a0 For journals, I have seen things like “helpful suggestions” from the editor on references that should be added before the paper can be accepted (“Perfectly up to you, of course:\u00a0 let me see the result before I make my final decision”).\u00a0 \u00a0 Different fields have different rates, making it difficult to evaluate journals in unfamiliar fields.\u00a0 Overall, I don’t know what to make out of these numbers.<\/p>\n
I think I am particularly annoyed about these rankings since my most cited paper (according to Google) doesn’t even exist, according to “Web of Knowledge<\/a>“, the current face of what I knew as the Science Citation Index.\u00a0 According to “Web of Knowledge”, my most cited papers are “Voting schemes for which it can be difficult to tell who won the election”, and “Scheduling a major college basketball conference”.\u00a0 If you go to Google Scholar<\/a> or, better yet, use Publish or Perish<\/a> to provide an interface into Scholar, my most cited works are the volume I did with David Johnson on the DIMACS Challenge on Cliques, Coloring, and Satisfiability and “A column generation approach for graph coloring” (with Anuj Mehrotra).\u00a0 “Voting Schemes…” and “Major College Basketball…” come in third and fifth.\u00a0 Now I understand that the volume is difficult to work with.\u00a0 Editors of refereed volumes don’t often do much research in putting together the volume, though I would argue that this volume is different.\u00a0 But where is “Column generation approach…” in Web of Knowledge?\u00a0 How can my most referred-to (and certainly one of my better) papers not exist there?<\/p>\n It turns out that in 1996, when “Column generation was published”, INFORMS Journal of Computing<\/em><\/a>, where it was published, had not been accepted by ISI, so, according to it and its successors, INFORMS Journal of Computing<\/em>, Volume 8, does not exist (indexing seems to have started in volume 11).\u00a0 Normally, this wouldn’t matter much, but we do keep track of “most cited” papers by the faculty here, and it hurts that this paper is not included.\u00a0 And including it would increase my Web of Knowledge h-index<\/a> by one (not that I obsessively check that value more than a dozen times in a year and wonder when someone is going to cite the papers that just need one or two more cites in order to ….., sorry, where was I?).<\/p>\n This is a long way of saying that while I am not sure of the relevance of journal rankings and ISI acceptance, I certainly understand its importance.\u00a0 So it is great when an operations journal I am involved in, International Transactions in Operational Research<\/em><\/a>, gets accepted into ISI.\u00a0 ITOR<\/em> has done a great job in the last few years in transitioning into being a good journal in our field.\u00a0\u00a0 The editor, Celso Ribeiro, has worked very hard on the journal during his editorship (I chaired the committee that chose Celso, so I can take some pride in his accomplishments).\u00a0 ITOR<\/em> is a journal from the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS)<\/a>, so this is good news for them too.\u00a0 Some schools only count journals with ISI designation.\u00a0 ITOR<\/em> gives a new outlet for faculty in those schools.<\/p>\n Congratulations ITOR<\/em> and Celso!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have mixed feelings about things like journal impact studies.\u00a0 Once a ranking is announced, forces come in to play to game the ranking.\u00a0 For journals, I have seen things like “helpful suggestions” from the editor on references that should be added before the paper can be accepted (“Perfectly up to you, of course:\u00a0 let … Continue reading “A New ISI Operations Research Journal”<\/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-1501","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\/1501","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=1501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}