Data Envelopment Analysis of OR/MS journals

Summary

This paper presents the results of a Data Envelopment Analysis of Operations Research/ Management Science journals on two questions: the duration of the refereeing/publication process and the relation between the length of the articles published and their impact. The second question uses data publicly available through the ISI Journal Citation Reports database and through the journals contents while for the first question data had to be gathered from the journal editors through an e-mail survey. The analysis gives cues about the amount each journal should aim to reduce their lead times, setting efficiency targets both on the average time from submission to first editorial decision and on the time from final editorial decision to publication. Similarly, for each journal, efficiency targets for the average article length are obtained. Our promoting of refereeing efficiency and paper length efficiency assumes that no loss of quality in the peer review process or in the knowledge transmission process needs to happen.