Operations Management Journal Ranking
Update: This ranking is relatively old now. It might not reflect the current situation anymore.
Operations management (OM) and SCM are closely interlinked. A citation analysis conducted by Petersen et al. (2011) shows what journals operations management researchers were referencing in their research published in three major operations management journals between 1999 and 2005 (IJOPM, JOM, and POM). These are the ten most referenced journals: Management Science, Journal of Operations Management, Harvard Business Review, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Production and Operations Management, Strategic Management Journal, Decision Sciences, Academy of Management Review, European Journal of Operational Research, and Sloan Management Review. A full list can be found in the article. Not all referenced journals fall in the domain of operations management. Also operations research (OR)/management science, general management, and marketing journals inspire the field of operations management. Both the citation analysis and the meta-analysis are interesting supplementations to other rankings such as the VHB-JOURQUAL ranking and rankings based on impact factors. Keep in mind that journal rankings have a downside and should not be the only criteria for judging the value of our research.
Using Experiments in Supply Chain Management Research
Recently, the use of laboratory experiments has attracted attention in SCM research. The Journal of Supply Chain Management dedicated a discussion forum to that topic, which is introduced with an essay by Eckerd and Bendoly. In this forum, Bachrach and Bendoly “touch on some of the basic tenets of rigorous behavioral experimentation” and “promote such rigor in future SCM behavioral studies”. The commentary by Rungtusanatham et al. deals with scenario-based role-playing experiments and vignette design. The self-explanatory title of the article by Siemsen is The usefulness of behavioral laboratory experiments in supply chain management research. Finally, Stevens discusses questions to consider when selecting student samples. Similarly, Thomas has discussed this topic in his recent article When student samples make sense in logistics research, published in the Journal of Business Logistics. To sum up, experiments might become increasingly important as behavioral research plays a growing role in our field.
The Relational View in SCM Research
Published in 1998, The relational view: Cooperative strategy and sources of interorganizational competitive advantage by Dyer and Singh remains one of the most influential business papers. Ten years later, the authors discussed their paper in an interview with ScienceWatch.com. They argue that “the main contribution of the [paper] was that it outlined a theory for considering dyads and networks of firms as a key unit of analysis for explaining superior individual firm performance”. The relational view extends both the industry structure view (unit of analysis: industry) and the resource-based view (unit of analysis: firm), because from this view a critical resource can span firm boundaries. The four sources of interorganizational competitive advantage identified by the authors are: (1) relation-specific assets, (2) knowledge-sharing routines, (3) complementary resources/capabilities, and (4) effective governance. While researchers are still searching for the paradigm of SCM research, the relational view can be an important building block to explain the supply and demand network. The relational view has later been extended by Lavie (2006).
