First, I would like to personally thank Lee Schwartz, the founding and outgoing editor in chief, for the fantastic job he has done creating the journal, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. M&SOM has blossomed from a non-entity four years ago to its status today as the leading specialized journal in the field of Operations Management (OM), due mainly to Lee's efforts and vision. His will certainly be a tough act to follow.

Like Lee, I believe the success of M&SOM is critical for the field of OM. Every other management discipline — accounting, finance, marketing, strategy, etc. — has one or more flagship journals. Four years ago, OM did not. M&SOM's objective was to become that journal.

And in a very short span of time, it has largely achieved this objective. Indeed a survey of leading academics by Olsen [2000] showed that M&SOM ranked ahead of all other specialized journal in OM. Moreover, it ranked only slightly below Operations Research (OR) and Management Science (MS). Indeed, fully 49.3 percent of respondents ranked M&SOM as an "A - or very top journal" (the highest survey rating) in their response. This percentage would likely be even higher today.

That said, M&SOM, like any new journal, faces important challenges, starting with its ability to establish a distinct and viable identity, and to attract a healthy stream of high-quality papers. I view the editorial policy as key to meeting these challenges. Details of the policy are provided on the journals new Web site (www.msom.org), but I will summarize it here.

Who are "We"?
To begin, we need to be clear about the journal's audience. M&SOM should be a research journal for a research audience. This is the best way to sustain and enhance its reputation. To be sure, we all want OM research to be rooted in real-world concerns and to produce ideas with potential impact. However, this is not the same thing as requiring that the journal speak directly to average managers. Other outlets exist for this purpose. Rather, M&SOM's objective should be to serve the OM research community — plain and simple.

Of course, in defining the journal's research audience I very much include researchers in corporate labs and practitioners with advanced training who are working on the interface of research and implementation. Both culturally and by training, this group of practitioners has much in common with academic researchers — they are critical partners in both contributing to OM research and incorporating research results into practice. But they are not average managers and are best viewed as our practice-oriented research colleagues.

Positioning Relative to OR and MS
Second, I believe M&SOM needs a distinct editorial positioning relative to OR and MS. OR is a methodology-based journal, which targets a broad range of engineering, business and applied math researchers. Likewise, MS serves a broad community of management researchers, differing in their area of study but all united by the fact that normative modeling and analysis (the "management science" method) is central to their research. M&SOM, in contrast, is a journal dedicated to the study of a functional area: operations, without any particular preference for the method of study. The common thread is the study of operations rather than the methodology by which such problems are studied.

As a result, I believe M&SOM occupies a distinct niche. OR editors tend to place a higher weight on methodological rather than contextual contribution; we should have the opposite weighting. Relative to MS, the differences are subtler but still substantial. While at MS, an editor might ask, "Is this paper of interest to the broad community of management-science-based researchers?" At M&SOM, we should ask "Is this paper of interest to the community of researchers interested in operations management?" For many types of work, the two answers are not the same.

Obvious examples include empirical or practice-based work, which says something interesting and important about operations but may not involve operations research or management science techniques per se. Behavioral or experimental research relevant to OM is another example. A third example, in my view, is much of the recent economics-based OM research, which is often viewed as too stylized from a normative, management-science perspective, but can provide valuable qualitative insights into issues that are central to OM. I think the emergence of this economics-OM interface work creates a great opportunity for our journal.

Finally, under Wally Hopp's new editorial policy, MS is targeting strategic OM papers. While we are certainly interested in strategic work as well, M&SOM should be open to the full range of OM problem domains, from the tactical to the strategic.

While there is admittedly much "gray area" here, I believe collectively this sort of positioning makes M&SOM distinct from OR and MS.

Expanding Our Scope
I also believe it is important to expand the scope of the journal, and I have several policies to accomplish this.

First, I will promote a liberal editorial policy in terms of the topics and styles of research the journal publishes. Indeed, precisely because our field is developing and still very much in flux, M&SOM has to work hard be absolutely open-minded when interpreting what constitutes OM research. Otherwise, we may miss major opportunities or changes of direction that, if not welcomed at M&SOM, will find outlets elsewhere. The sole criteria for publication should be: 1) that the paper communicates interesting and important ideas or findings that OM researchers will value, and 2) that it reflects high standards of scholarship.

In addition, I would like us to take some calculated risks on certain papers. As a young journal, I think we can afford this. However, my strong preference is to take risks on fit, topic or style and not quality.

Another policy I am implementing to help expand the scope of the journal is to introduce some new categories of papers. These special-category papers are intended to enhance and augment the journal's core editorial mission. They include "OM Forum," an outlet for opinion and perspective articles in the field, "OM Practice," modeled roughly on OR Practice but with more of a contextual focus; and finally "Surveys," "Technical Notes" and "Correspondence" articles. The aim of these special categories is to create opportunities to publish work that is of significant interest to the OM research community, but does not really fit in the style of mainstream research papers.

Fast Reviews
Lastly, we need to continue Lee's strategy of offering fast reviews and quick publication of results, so authors can get their manuscripts in print in a year rather than in the three-plus years it often takes at OR and MS. I think this policy has the effect of positioning M&SOM as an outlet for current — not just archival — results. It also gives authors a strong incentive to submit to us first.

OM is a growing field producing an increasing depth and breadth of research work. Therefore, I have faith that the natural forces of research creativity are on our side, and that if we can simply manage to tap into them, the journal will be a raging success in the years ahead.

References
1. Olsen, J.E., 2002, "Top Journals in Operations Management and Operations Research," unpublished report, Katz Graduate School of Management, University of Pittsburgh, available at www.bus.ucf.edu/csaunders/omor%20journals.pdf

Garrett J. van Ryzin is the editor in chief of Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.

Management Science
By Wallace J. Hopp

It is a great honor to assume the role of editor in chief of Management Science. For nearly 50 years, Management Science has been the premier outlet for scientific research on management. For this tradition of excellence we owe Hau Lee and the other previous editors a great debt of gratitude.

To uphold the high standard set by my predecessors, my overriding concern will be to maintain the journal's reputation for quality. While I strongly believe our mission is to publish papers motivated by the concerns of practicing managers, I also recognize that Management Science is decidedly an academic research journal. Hence, these papers must represent innovative and significant contributions to the research literature.

The evaluation of quality and fit of individual manuscripts will be done by our department editors. We are very fortunate to have a set of world-class scholars willing to devote their precious time to this vital function. (Visit the Management Science Web site at http://mansci.pubs.informs.org for the current listing of departments and editors). To help the DE's interpret the journal mission in the context of their individual disciplines, I have offered the following general advice:

• Management Science papers should pass the manager's "so what?" test. One should be able to imagine explaining to practicing managers why the paper's issues, results and insights are of potential importance to them.
• Management Science should favor research motivated by strategic issues over research motivated by tactical issues. We need to play a leadership role in applying our legacy of powerful analytic tools to high-level, long-term planning issues faced by managers.
• Management Science must be flexible enough to publish "big idea" papers and interdisciplinary papers that do not fit neatly into established departments.

I have also worked with a software company to develop a new on-line submission and review system. As of Jan. 1 of this year, all submissions to Management Science must be made electronically at informs.manuscriptcentral.com. (Instructions for authors and editors are available through the system and the Management Science Web site.) This Web-based system will eliminate mail delays, reduce the administrative burden on department editors, and centralize the tracking of papers so that we can monitor progress toward our responsiveness goals.

With continued creativity by the OR/MS research community and a bit of good management practice of our own, I am confident that the second half-century of Management Science will be even greater than the first.

Wallace J. Hopp is the editor in chief of Management Science.

Transportation Science
By Hani S. Mahmassani

Transportation Science holds a unique position in the community of transportation researchers and scholars in that it is, more than any other journal, the symbol of the success and coming of age of the field of transportation as a recognized area of academic scholarship. It is one that the transportation community can show scholars in other disciplines as best representative of the scholarly contributions of the field. As such, I believe that it is essential to maintain not only the outstanding quality that has consistently characterized the journal, but its field-defining character as well.

Transportation systems continue to be a rich source of intellectually stimulating and methodologically challenging problem classes. One noteworthy driver is the growing impact of new technologies on transportation systems — through application of sensing, telecommunications, information technologies and so on. The net result of these technologies is: 1) the availability of real-time information on the current state of the system, and hence a rapidly accumulating record of both short-term and long-term history, and 2) the ability to implement interventions (e.g. control actions, routing decisions, information dissemination policies, prices, etc.) dynamically. These capabilities are changing fundamentally the very formulation of the problems addressed by the transportation community, the decision strategies and nature of the policies that may be considered, as well as the algorithmic procedures devised for application in real-time. The problems arise with both passenger as well as freight transportation systems, and involve both vehicular traffic as well as managed fleets of buses, trucks, ships, airplanes, etc.

Problems that arise in such stochastic dynamic systems tend to be considerably less tractable analytically than corresponding static deterministic (as well as stationary stochastic) versions of problems that arise in conjunction with these systems. When evaluating the quality of a particular decision strategy or algorithmic procedure, there are difficult issues of appropriate benchmarking and performance criteria. Both simulation and application to historical data streams are the primary means typically available to evaluate these strategies. Derivation of "worst case" performance and competitive ratios under idealized conditions are often either too difficult or yield results that do not pertain much to actual conditions for which these procedures are intended. The journal can play a major role in defining (i.e., letting the community of scholars define) what constitute scholarly contributions in this general area, as well as in stimulating the field to produce the kind of discipline-defining and field-defining contributions in this increasingly important and relevant problem environment.

Other areas of opportunity for the journal include developments in modeling complex dynamic systems, especially vehicular and mixed-mode traffic flow coupled with related observational work enabled by new technologies that allow expanding capabilities to measure what is taking place in transportation systems. Examples of the new technology include container tracking through RF-transponders, individual trajectories through GPS receivers embedded in mobile phone chipsets and video image processing. Experimental games are another non-traditional source of insight into the dynamic properties of the associated systems. The role of such approaches, their relevance to real transportation systems, and their use to study the potential impacts of measures, such as pricing and information availability or the behavior of electronic auction markets, are the subject of growing interest in the transportation community.

It is my hope that Transportation Science continues to reflect the excitement of the science of transportation. My predecessor, Gilbert Laporte, has set the bar really high through truly remarkable accomplishments in all aspects of the editorial process, and leaves the journal in excellent health. I feel honored to be entrusted with the stewardship of this important symbol and vital element of our field.

Hani S. Mahmassani is the editor in chief of Transportation Science.



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