Institutional research productivity in production and operations management

Abstract This study investigates the research contributions of academic and other institutions in the area of Productions and Operations Management (POM) over the past 15 years. Similar studies have also been previously conducted in other functional areas of business such as Finance, Marketing, MIS and Management. Institutional productivity is assessed by counting the number of articles and number of standardized pages published in five major POM research journals during a 15 year period from 1980 to 1994. The journals selected include Management Science, Decision Sciences, Journal of Operations Management, IIE Transactions and International Journal of Production Research. A previous study had ranked these as the top 5 journals publishing high quality POM research. Results indicate that among the 50 institutions that emerged from our study as the top ranked ones, no single institution dominated the rankings across all the journals. The diversity of institutions reflected in these rankings shows that the field of POM is maturing and growing. Even though the overall research productivity has increased tremendously over the course of the past 15 years, the longitudinal analysis reveals that often there are periods of high and low productivity in the life of individual research institutions. The results of this study can be used by industrial researchers, doctoral students, and faculty members to assess the primary sources of contribution to each journal, to better guide their publication strategies, and even to help plan their careers.