Outlets for operations management research: a DEA assessment of journal quality and rankings

Determining the quality of research outlets is important for Operations Management (OM) for reasons well documented in the published literature. Over the past few decades, utilising several different methodologies from a variety of perspectives, 15 studies have assessed the quality of journals that publish OM research. The published results are inconsistent in that the relative quality of journals varies from one study to the next and no single set of OM journals is unanimously recognised as being the top set. Historically, OM researchers have published in a wide variety of journals, utilised a variety of research methodologies and studied a broad range of topics. Given that each of the 15 studies assessed journal quality from a different perspective and utilised different methodologies, they represent a diversity of opinions regarding the OM field and add to the knowledge base regarding the quality of OM research outlets. In this paper, we combine the published results in a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to assess the quality of the most visible journals that publish OM research. DEA is a linear programming tool for the evaluation of decision-making units and its use in our context (a meta-analysis of journal quality studies) is a new application of the technique. Our results suggest that the top 10 outlets for OM research include five journals that are considered OM dedicated, two Operations Research journals, one Engineering journal and two Interdisciplinary journals.