OR/MS Today - October 1997

OR/MS Today, October 1997

Focus on Journals

By Michael A. Trick

Journals provide the backbone for any professional or academic field. It is through journals that a field documents its progress. Researchers need journals to keep on top of rapidly-changing research activities. Practitioners use journals to stay ahead of their competitors in understanding the latest results.

INFORMS sponsors 11 journals: 10 print journals and one electronic one. INFORMS Online (IOL) (http://www.informs.org) provides information on each of these journals through its Publications Home Page (http://www.informs.org/Pubs/Pubshome.html). Unlike some professional societies (such as the Association for Computing Machinery http://www.acm.org), we work on a distributed model for handling journals.

In this model, IOL provides basic information about each journal. Journals may then choose to provide more extensive information through their own web pages. The basic information includes things like editorial board, forthcoming papers and instructions to authors. Operations Research, Information Systems Research, Interfaces and INFORMS' newest journal, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, all offer pages of their own, which can have far more than the basic information. For instance, Interfaces, as part of Practice Online (http://www.informs.org/POL/), has published appendices to papers, bibliographies and the like on its web page. Operations Research has plans to do the same on its web page (http://www.informs.org/Pubs/OR).

Operations Research outlines its Electronic Operations Research Initiative at (http://www.informs.org/Pubs/OR/ORElectronic.html). I think this "dual publication" option is very exciting. My field of endeavor is computational combinatorial optimization, and I am frustrated by the limits of traditional "30-typed-pages-in-a-journal" publications. Much of what I offer to the field is in the form of data sets, solution codes and results from computational experiments. By combining a traditional article with supplementary material on the web, researchers and others can get a clearer picture of my contribution.

With this distributed model, IOL can concentrate on activities to link our journals. The most exciting activity that is underway is to have all abstracts of our print journals online in a common, searchable database. Given the breadth and variety of our journals, it is difficult to know where to look for articles on a specific topic. Our searchable database alleviates this problem. We already offer the online Annual Comprehensive Index (http://www.informs.org/Biblio/ACI.html) indexing titles and keywords from more than 150 journals in OR/MS. Our new efforts will add full abstracts for all INFORMS journals.

The final publication activity is perhaps the most exciting: Interactive Transactions on OR/MS (ITORMS) (http://www.informs.org/Pubs/ITORMS) is an online journal edited by Ramesh Sharda. Articles published in ITORMS appear on its web page rather than in a print journal. The first volume of four papers is now available.

New at IOL
Be sure to check out our extensive pages in support of the Dallas National Meeting (http://www.informs.org/Conf/Dallas97) and submit contributed abstracts for the Montreal National Meeting (http://www.informs.org/Conf/Montreal98). Also new is a pointer to INFORMS-sponsored math modules aimed at high school students (find the pointer on our Students and Education page http://www.informs.org/Edu/Edu.html), but of interest to those well beyond high school.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome at trick@cmu.edu

Michael Trick of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, is the editor of INFORMS Online.

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