Research Strategies Used by OR/MS Workers: Extension of the Analysis of U.S. Flagship Journals to the United Kingdom

Abstract

Reisman and Kirschnick (1995) have defined seven process categories among OR/MS research strategies and analysed the contents of U.S. flagship OR/MS journals in 1992 to examine how often OR/MS workers use these processes. We have applied their method of analysis to the 1994 contents of the U.K. flagship journal, the Journal of the Operational Research Society. As well as providing some insight into the nature of OR/MS research in the United Kingdom, the results enable a comparison to be made with the results from the U.S. flagship journals. The findings confirm that the ripple process is dominantly used in theoretical research, and the transfer-of-technology process is the one most frequently used in true applications in the United Kingdom as well as the United States. Because the literature is dominated by theoretical research using a ripple strategy, the discrimination achieved by the classification is limited. To provide further discrimination an alternative categorisation is used to analyse the nature of research output, distinguishing between the object (material, social, personal) and the objective (knowledge, function, purpose) of the research. The paper proposes that the analysis of the content of research, using a method such as Reisman and Kirschnick's categorisation, could be used for the evaluation of OR/MS research output to complement citation analysis and peer reviews.