Editorial Column—An Open Letter to Reviewers

Abstract

This year, January–October 2013, Service Science received 60 original submissions and 21 revised submissions. Since taking on the editor-in-chief role, I have relied on a great many others, volunteers who have given their time and expertise to help evaluate these submissions. Of course, I am talking about the reviewers and the editorial board. Writing a review is a commitment, and sometimes it is a chore. But a good review makes my job easier, and overall, I have been fortunate to receive good reviews from good reviewers. This year, we received reports from more than 150 reviewers. Now, it is time to take stock and acknowledge all who have helped. Those who reviewed for Service Science in 2013 are listed in this issue, along with the current advisory and editorial boards. I thank them all sincerely. The Service Science website1 offers some advice for writing a good review, including “be constructive” and “be specific” (for additional advice, see also Roedigger 2007). There is nothing wrong with such advice—it is good advice—but it is generic and would hold true for any review and any journal. But I guess I like to think that Service Science is not just any journal. It does not aim mainly to reflect new extensions to an existing body of knowledge but to define a new body of knowledge and a new discipline (Maglio 2013, Qiu 2012). There is no single method or set of methods that all papers in Service Science must follow. There is no single theory or model that should underlie all work. Service Science aims to represent the cutting edge of service research. And so I think I owe it to reviewers to provide some specific guidance, including how to think about and evaluate our particular brand of interdisciplinary work. Here goes. As a field, service science aims to understand, improve, and innovate complex service systems, which may require methods and theories from disciplines including, but not limited to, operations, industrial engineering, marketing, computer science, psychology, information systems, and design (Ostrom et al. 2010, Spohrer and Maglio 2010). As a journal, Service Science documents empirical, modeling, and theoretical studies of complex service systems, relying on approaches from many different disciplines (see Maglio 2013, Qiu 2012). Two of my favorite articles from Service Science concern simulation and modeling but take very broad perspectives, incorporating findings from multiple disciplines: Park et al. (2012) and Qiu (2009). The article by Robin Qiu was selected by the editorial board to receive the 2013 Best Article Award for Service Science, which was presented by the INFORMS Service Science Section at the annual meeting in Minneapolis this year. It is clear that interdisciplinary work is valued. Yet combining multiple disciplines in a single journal—in a single paper, even—makes judging quality hard. It makes reviewing hard. Reviewers should be both constructive and critical, telling authors and editors mainly what is good about a paper and what could be improved. For interdisciplinary papers, reviewers should focus on the parts they can evaluate rather than on the parts they cannot. Because articles need not follow a set pattern, and many methods may be appropriate, reviewers should not focus on their favorite method or their favorite theory and evaluate the whole paper from a single viewpoint. Reviewers should consider what they do not know to be possibly interesting, rather than probably wrong. The field of service science is young. The journal Service Science exists to cultivate the field, to help it grow and thrive. What we publish ought to be correct, empirically grounded, and innovative, and it should lead the way to a new discipline. To do this, we have to look for reasons to publish papers, rather than reasons not to publish papers. We have to nurture good ideas and interesting work. We have to take calculated risks. We have to be open to new approaches and new combinations of old ones. We have to look past our individual biases and toward a future in which Service Science the journal has defined service science the field.