Editorial: the birth of a journal

Not long after I joined Cranfield to take up the Chair in Operations Management in 1978, Gordon Wills, Martin Christopher and I discussed the possibility of launching a new Journal through MCB (the former name of Emerald Group Publishing) to cover the Operations Management field. It is difficult to imagine now, but at that time there were few avenues for publication open to Operations Management Researchers, particularly in Europe. The POM Journal in the USA was highly respected but very academic and perhaps somewhat parochial, particularly when case studies were taken from outside the USA. Within Europe, the International Journal of Production Research (IJPR) published studies with a managerial content but was primarily focussed on research in production engineering with a high technical content. The most prolific coverage was in journals relating to Operations Research but these tended to be very technique oriented and biased towards quantitative modelling. When it came to practitioner publications there was little between magazine pieces and highly academic journals – the sole exception being “Control”, from the American Production and Inventory Control Society. It was against this background that I took on the task of Founding Editor and set about recruiting the Editorial Board.

I have to say that in preparing this little history, I was heartened to see that the founding philosophy of the Journal is still beautifully encapsulated on the inside front cover of the Journal. The fundamental points were that the Journal should be concerned with all aspects of Operations Management, that it should be of interest to academics and practitioners alike and that the focus should be managerial rather than technical. The editorial policy of using a double blind review process was specified for three main reasons. Firstly, it provided a means of maintaining an unbiased viewpoint; secondly it meant that the Journal would itself be a vehicle for improving the standard of research work in the field and thirdly it meant that Academic Institutions would accept that publications in the Journal were of a standard comparable with those in other high quality journals (note that this was a long time before the idea of the “UK Research Assessment Exercise” existed). It is with great personal satisfaction that I note that these values are still virtually unchanged today.

Over the years a number of people have asked why we used “Operations and Production Management” rather than the usually accepted “Production and Operations Management” in the title. The answer is simply that IJOPM rolls better off the tongue than IJPOM or IPOMJ!

Today's editors have their own problems but I suspect that they are rather different in nature to those of the early 1980s. Imagine a world before the existence of public comparative research assessment or even of any accepted “norms” for the number of publications that it might be reasonable to expect from academic faculty and, outside of the USA, any real differentiation between journals with regard to their refereeing process. Add to this the scarcity of Operations Management faculty across Europe and the existence of few chairs – virtually all of the holders on the editorial board. Academics in the USA were under considerably more pressure to publish than those in Europe because of tenure requirements but the new journal had no track record of acceptance by the universities. The double blind refereeing process was in my opinion critical for success in this respect and at least IJOPM offered a much shorter time to publication than other journals. However, it was not intended to allow US material to dominate the content. So for the journal to be viable it was crucial to encourage high quality submission in sufficient numbers to keep the publication process going – about 20 to 24 per annum for a quarterly journal. The outcome and timing of the double blind refereeing process cannot be predicted so from the editor's viewpoint the ideal way to run such a journal is to have a large backlog of papers – additionally allowing the editor to control the mix of content for each edition. Unfortunately such a backlog extends for the author the submission to publication delay – a factor that became of some significance with research assessment being carried out over fixed periods. Assuming a rather hopeful final acceptance rate of 50 per cent this meant that as editor I was looking for around 50 submissions over the first year and at least 30 of those before the launch edition. I regret that I have no records of the actual submissions during the first few years of IJOPM's existence, but I can tell you that it was never enough! In the early years inevitably submissions were often obtained by cajoling personal contacts, blackmailing the editorial board and simply begging people working in interesting areas. Even with all the pressures we did manage to survive the first few editions. When it came to trying to source interesting material the old adage remained true – if you want something doing ask someone busy. Before I left London Business School to move to Cranfield I carried out the UK's first formal (but completely internal) research assessment exercise with startling results. I do not think I am betraying any confidences now by revealing that we uncovered two entirely different groups of faculty. Allowing variations across subjects, the main result was that over a number of years the average number of publications was one publication per faculty member per annum. However, this average concealed the fact that the average number of publications per faculty member that published at all during the period was two per annum – half the faculty not having published anything at all. While I do not propose to submit my research methodology for scrutiny, the evidence was that the people to chase for publications were already research active – the trick was to persuade them to submit to your journal rather than elsewhere. Chasing the research virgins I left to others.

Although the earliest years of the Journal's existence were, as indicated, somewhat precarious we always managed to publish, subscriptions continued to rise and the rate of submissions climbed as we established IJOPM as the leading European journal in the field.

I wish the Journal every success for the next 25 years and beyond – in whatever form it takes.