Editorial Column—Service Science is Growing Up

Abstract

Service Science was first published in March 2009. In its first four years, Robin Qiu served as founding editor-in-chief, navigating effectively the rocky road of a start-up and self-published journal, gaining recognition and momentum, and ultimately securing INFORMS as the journal’s publisher and backer at the start of 2012. I have served as INFORMS Service Science’s editor-in-chief for the past three years, and I was recently reappointed for three more, through the end of 2018. I am honored and excited by the opportunity to continue to serve the journal and the community. And I am deeply grateful for the support of colleagues and for the support of INFORMS. INFORMS is a perfect partner for Service Science. There are some very talented and dedicated staff in the publication office at INFORMS, notably Kelly Kophazi, our managing editor, and Kara Tucker and Meaghan White, our production editors, among many others. The journal passed its first review with the INFORMS publications committee and board of directors in 2015. The support of INFORMS means a great deal, as INFORMS publishes many top management journals, including Management Science, Marketing Science, Operations Research, and Information Systems Research. But to be perfectly honest, I have been more than a little worried that as a young journal, Service Science could not play in the same league as these more grown-up journals. For one thing, competition is stiff—competition for submissions and for reviewers means that our submission rate and time to action has been a bit uneven over several years. And for another, as a relatively new journal, Service Science has a limited track record and therefore limited impact—I have heard over and over about how junior faculty or those at specific schools or those in specific regions are advised not to submit their papers to our young journal because its impact is untested and unknown. And to be honest, I am tired of hearing this. So I hope I will not be hearing it much longer. I am pleased to announce that Service Science is now included in Thomson Reuters Web of Science, Social Science Citation Index, starting with Volume 5 (2013), and will receive its first journal impact factor in the next Journal Citation Report in June 2016. Of course, this does not mean that the impact will be very high to start, but at least now, we can measure impact just as grown-up journals do. Service Science published 73 articles between 2013–2015, and as of January 2016, Web of Science reports 67 total citations. It can only go up from here. Inclusion in the Web of Science signals a new phase in the journal’s growth, and is a real sign of its maturation. In 2016, there will be more signs of the journal maturing. First, a series of special issues on cross-cutting topics collectively establish key concepts in the emerging field of service science and also connect the journal to a variety of new related areas and a set of new researchers. In this issue, there are articles from a special joint issue with IEEE Transactions on Service Computing on a new alignment in service research for business and computing services. In June, a special issue from the 2014 Cornell Hospitality Research Summit will appear. In September, a special issue on multi-actor value creation, with papers invited from the 2014 Conference of the European Association for Research on Services (RESER), will appear. Throughout these and other upcoming issues of Service Science, interdisciplinarity is increasing. Second, the field of service science and the mission of the journal continue to evolve together. Service comprises activities and technologies that create value through interaction of multiple stakeholders, and typically requires interdisciplinary approaches for understanding and design. Today, ever more services incorporate information and technology to enhance or enable effective human action, creating smart service systems. Manuscripts now focus not only on human-centered services or on technologyand information-based services, but on problems and prospects for combining humans and technology to create value in real-world contexts. Capturing basic and applied knowledge needed to understand and design smart, human-centered service systems is key to the mission of Service Science.