ARTICLE IN PRESS

Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Int. J. Production Economics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijpe

An assessment of world-wide research productivity in production

and operations management
Pao-Nuan Hsieh a,, Pao-Long Chang b
a
b

Department of Library and Information Science, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
Department of Business Administration, Feng Chia University, No. 100, Wenhwa Road, Seatwen, Taichung 40724, Taiwan

a r t i c l e i n f o

abstract

Article history:
Received 1 February 2009
Accepted 30 March 2009
Available online 19 April 2009

Journal publications are important to facilitate knowledge sharing among production

and operations management (POM) academics and practitioners. The purpose of this
study was to explore the global POM research performance based on papers published
in 20 core POM journals in the past half century. The data for the study were obtained
from Thomson Reuters Web of Science/Knowledge databases, from 1959 to 2008, when
63,776 papers were published in POM journals. The annual distribution of papers
published shows a signicant growth in POM research productivity over the time period
1959 to 2008. The most productive authors in these ve decades were T.C. Edwin Cheng
from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong; Gilbert Laporte from HEC
Montreal, Canada; S.K. Goyal from Concordia University, Canada; S. Eilon from the
University of London, UK; and Oded Berman from the University of Toronto, Canada. The
ve most productive institutions were as follows: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Purdue University,
and the University of Michigan. The countries found to have the highest outputs were
the USA, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands and Taiwan.
& 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Production and operations management
Scientic productivity
Bibliometric analysis

1. Introduction
Journal publications are important to facilitate knowledge dissemination among production and operations
management (POM) academics and practitioners. Most
academic disciplines in the eld of management have
analyzed their own research productivity in terms of
authors, institutions and other bibliometric characteristics.
Some disciplines publish such studies on a fairly
regular basis: for instance, accounting (Chung et al.,
1992; Glover et al., , 2006; Weber and Stevenson, 1981;
Zivney et al., 1995), business (Henry and Burch, 1974;
Moore and Taylor, 1980; Niemi, 1988b, 1998; Young et al.,
1996), nance (Alexander and Mabry, 1994; Borokhovich
et al., 1995; Borokhovich, et al., 1994, 1995; Chandy and

 Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 2 33662965; fax: +886 2 23632859.

E-mail address: pnhsieh@ntu.edu.tw (P.-N. Hsieh).

0925-5273/$ - see front matter & 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijpe.2009.03.015

Williams, 1994; Chung and Cox, 1990; Chung et al., 2001;

Cornelius and Persson, 2006; Heck et al., 1986; Jones and
Roberts, 2005; Knight et al., 2000), management (Coe and
Weinstock, 1984; Hancock et al., 1992; Jaunch and Glueck,
1975; Sharplin and Marby, 1985; Stahl et al., 1988; Young
et al., 1996), marketing (Niemi, 1988a), management
information systems (Claver et al., 2000; Grover et al.,
1992; Shim et al., 1993; Vogel and Wetherbe, 1984),
operations research/management science (Chang and
Hsieh, 2008), and even on an emerging technology used
in business and industry, such as RFID (Ngai et al., 2008).
With reference to production and operations management, the rst journal evaluation study was conducted by
Barman et al. (1991), who ranked 20 POM-related journals
based on the perceptions expressed by US-based members
of the Decision Sciences Institute. Ansari et al. (1992)
identied 72 journals that could potentially be important
to a POM academic or practitioner. Vokurka (1996) and
Goh et al. (1996, 1997) used objective citation analysis to

ARTICLE IN PRESS
P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

determine the relative importance of various POM

journals. Young et al. (1996) represented the rst attempt
at ranking the POM research productivity of individuals
and business schools in the USA, according to the number
and quality of articles published in the Barman et al.
(1991) list of POM-related journals during the period
19891993. Malhotra and Kher (1996) classied institutional research productivity in terms of the total number
of articles and pages published in the top ve journals in
the Barman list. These journals included Management
Science, Decision Sciences, Journal of Operations Management, IIE Transactions, and International Journal of Production Research. Soteriou et al. (1999) presented rankings of
the publication outlets in the ve most highly ranked
POM-related journals as perceived by POM researchers in
Europe, and commented on the differences between
European and US academics. In 2001, Barman et al.
conducted a 10-year update to re-establish the ranking
of those POM journals surveyed by Barman et al. (1991)
and to capture changes in stakeholder perceptions that
might have taken place in the previous decade. Olson
(2005) obtained quality ratings and rankings of 39
journals in operations management and related disciplines through surveys of faculty members at the top 25
US business schools in both 2000 and 2002. Hadjinicola
and Soteriou (2006) identied factors that promote the
research productivity of groups of POM researchers in US
business schools and noted three factors that increase
both research productivity and the quality of articles
published: (a) the presence of a POM research center, (b)
funding received from external sources for research
purposes, and (c) better library facilities. Jiang et al.
(2007) examined the stream of China-related POM
research over 19802005 to determine trends in quantity,

541

topical coverage, and data sources. While much has been

written on POM, an extensive and longitudinal literature
review is still lacking.
Following the evolution and growth of the eld of
production and operations management, a number of
studies have recently appeared that provide insights into
the assessment of the research productivity of individual
researchers and departments in academic institutions.
Most of these studies focused their efforts on US and
European academics, and excluded both non-US and nonEuropean/Europe researchers. In this study we contribute
to the trend towards globalized research efforts in the
POM discipline in the past half-century.

2. Methods
2.1. Journal selection
A number of recent studies have identied journals
that are outlets for research in POM (Barman et al.,
1991, 2001; Goh et al., 1997; Saladin, 1985; Scudder
and Hill, 1998; Soteriou et al., 1999; Vokurka, 1996).
However, some of the journals listed by previous studies
were multi-disciplinary and not specic to POM (Young
et al., 1996), and some new journals needed to be added.
For the purposes of this study, those journals that were
deemed not pertaining directly to the POM discipline
were excluded. Based on the list of previous research, 20
POM-related journals were selected for this study.
These are the journals that are indexed in the Thomson
Reuters Web of Science/Knowledge (WoS/K) Science
Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E) and Social Science

Table 1
Twenty core POM journals.
No. Journal title

Impact factor

Mean

Articles per year Mean

1
2
3
4

Computers & Industrial Engineering

Computers & Operations Research
Decision Sciences
European Journal of Operational Research

0.347
0.746
1.055
0.824

0.358
0.556
0.864
0.668

87
199
23
447

99
183
23
651

93
221
21
838

109
136
21
471

8
14
4
24

UK
UK
USA
NL

5
6
7

IIE Transactions
Interfaces
International Journal of Operations &
Production Management
International Journal of Production Economics
International Journal of Production Research
Journal of Operations Management
Journal of Productivity Analysis
Journal of the Operational Research Society
Management Science
Mathematics of Operations Research
Naval Research Logistics
OmegaInternational Journal of Management
Science
Operations Research
Operations Research Letters
Production and Operations Management
Transportation Science

0.476 0.637 0.797 0.502

0.524 0.338 0.575 0.501
0.597 0.612 1.054 0.545

86
36
61

86
44
61

85
42
59

89
56
53

12
6
12

USA
USA
UK

3895/6.11%
2893/4.54%
1067/1.67%
11445/
17.95%
2004/3.14%
3595/5.64%
1169/1.83%

8
9
10
12
11
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

Issues/ Country Papers/

year
percentage
2005 2006 2007 19982007 2005 2006 2007 19982007
19592008
0.65
0.893
1.62
0.918

0.554
1.147
1.435
1.096

hindex

36
47
56
86
49
44
33

1.008
0.481
1.419
0.492
0.603
1.669
0.906
0.373
0.648

1.183
0.799
2.042
0.763
0.597
1.687
0.785
0.362
0.663

0.995
0.560
1.851
0.439
0.784
1.931
0.875
0.548
1.327

0.590
0.559
1.302
0.545
0.733
1.470
0.969
0.379
0.566

158
251
38
31
144
136
54
65
49

217
270
49
35
139
141
36
59
52

212
278
82
35
159
133
55
73
62

165
247
33
24
140
122
45
55
50

18
18
6
6
12
12
4
7/8
6

NL
UK
NL
NL
UK
USA
USA
USA
UK

3015/4.73%
37
5394/8.46%
65
418/0.66%
37
445/0.70%
27
6904/10.83% 52
5124/8.03% 141
1504/2.36%
61
2204/3.46%
48
2351/3.69%
42

1.219
0.597
0.831
0.714

1.234
0.767
2.516
1.27

1.467
0.517
2.123
1.427

0.942
0.520
0.698
0.792

70
86
24
37

82
94
39
38

82
112
51
35

95
72
17
32

6
10
4
4

USA
NL
USA
USA

7127/11.18%
1877/2.94%
382/0.60%
963/1.51%

117
42
26
49

ARTICLE IN PRESS
542

P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

Citation Index (SSCI) databases. Table 1 gives an overview

of the 20 core POM journals, listed alphabetically.
The value of publications is commonly rated by the
ranking of the journals in the Journal Citation Report (JCR)
(Lenhard et al., 2006), which is published annually in two
editions: science, and social science, by Thomson Reuters
(formerly known as Thomson Scientic and The Institute
for Scientic Information). Impact factor (IF) is a measure
of the frequency with which the average article in a
journal has been cited in a particular year or period. The
annual JCR impact factor is a ratio of citations to recent
citable items published. Thus, the impact factor of a
journal is calculated by dividing the number of current
year citations to the source items published in that journal
during the previous two years (Gareld, 1994). Since this
factor is an easily available means to quantify the value of
scientic work, it is fast becoming widely adopted in the
academic world. We list three-year impact factors and
mean impact factors from the years 19982007 for the 20
journals, using information from the Thomson Reuters
2007 JCR and earlier reports. The impact factor helps us
evaluate a journals relative importance, especially when
compared to others in the same eld. All 20 journals had a
ten-years mean impact factor greater than 0.4, the highest
ve mean impact factors being for Management Science
(1.470), the Journal of Operations Management (1.302),
Mathematics of Operations Research (0.969), Operations
Research (0.942), and Decision Sciences (0.864), and only
two journals had an impact factor above 1. When analyzed
by region of publication, the USA had the largest number
of journals (9), followed by the UK (6) and the Netherlands
(5).
We also totaled the number of articles published in
these journals in the last three years (Table 1). Seven
journals published more than 100 articles per year, of
which European Journal of Operational Research published
838 articles in 2007 and an average 471 articles per year.
The average IF of these seven journals was less than 0.7,
but Management Science (122 articles per year) had the
largest mean IF of 1.470. Production and Operations
Management, which published an average 17 articles per
year, was the least productive journal of these 20, but had
a mean IF of 0.698. Decision Science quarterly publishing
21 articles per year was the second least, but had a mean
IF of 0.864. Journal of Operations Management, a bimonthly,
published 33 articles per year, but had a mean IF greater
than 1 (1.302).
Hirsch (2005) proposed the h-index, a new metric for
characterizing the scientic output of a piece of research,
which is dened as follows: A scientist has index h if h of
his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the
other (Nph) papers have ph citations each, where
Np total number of papers. The idea was effectively
publicized by scientometrics literature and it has positive
reception in the scientic community. Braun et al. (2005,
2006) suggested a h-type index for journals to supplement
journal impact factors. Management Science also had the
greatest h-index at 141, followed by Operations Research at
117, while the h-indices of the remaining 18 journals were
less than 100, of which Production and Operations Management had the lowest at 25.

2.2. Data collection

The data for the study were identied by searching in
the WoS/K SCI-E and SSCI databases, based on the 20 core
POM journals. The date of the search was March 812,
2009. The WoS/K includes information not only on the
frequency of citations, expressed by the impact factor, but
also on the authors origin, document type and the
number of citations of individual articles. The 20 core
POM journals published 63,776 papers from the year
19592008.
Many publications had multiple authors. We adopted
an inclusive approach to counting, to better enable the
evaluation of author productivity. Each institution that
appeared in the author list received one credit for an
article. When articles were authored by collaborating
institutions from multiple countries, each country received one count for its participation, irrespective of the
number of collaborating institutions. For example, Taiwan
and Hong Kong would each receive one credit for an
article co-authored by one Taiwanese institution and two
Hong Kong institutions. Thus, the number of credits for an
article is subject to variation, depending on the number of
institutional authors and the number of countries represented among the collaborating institutions. When institutions collaborated, a single article was counted more
than once.
The resident population (expressed in millions of
inhabitants) for each country was retrieved from the CIA
World Factbook.

3. Results
3.1. Annual distribution of the papers analyzed
Fig. 1 shows the annual distribution of the papers
published during the course of the years analyzed. It can
be observed, rstly, that there was a period of six years,
which can be classied as years of inactivity. Afterwards,
considerable increase is found in 1975, 1986, 1996 and
2008. Thus, it can be concluded that the scientic
3500

Papers
2008, 3110

3000

2500

1996, 2254

2000

1986, 1705

2003, 1944

1975, 1455

1500

1000

500

1959, 173
1970, 96

1955 1960 1965 1970 1975

1980

1985 1990 1995 2000

2005 2010

Fig. 1. Annual distribution of the papers published from 1959 to 2008.

ARTICLE IN PRESS
P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

community in the research stream of POM is progressively, if unevenly, increasing.

3.2. POM research productivity
We observed a signicant growth in POM research
productivity. The percentage of increase is 1,808% from
1959 (172 documents) to 2008 (3,110 documents). The
data were further segregated into ve time periods, each
standing for one decade, to facilitate comparison and
analysis. Table 2 shows documents published over the ve
decades. Evidently, growth in research production was
greatest in the last decade (19992008), with major peaks
in 1975, 1986, and 1996. In 1975, the increase from the
preceding year (1974) was 24.58%. The increase in number
from 1974 to 1975 was 1,119, and 301 from 1985 to 1986.
3.3. Types of document
The document types identied by the WoS/K databases
were analyzed. About 11 types of document were used to
disseminate research in each decade, and 19 types of
document were used by the POM researchers to share
research outputs in the ve decades. Journal articles, that
is, the original research articles, were the most frequently
used document type, comprising 73.69% (46,998 papers)
of the total publications, followed by book reviews (6.88%,
4,385), proceedings papers (5.38%, 3,428 papers), meeting
abstracts (5.13%, 3,269), editorial materials (2.78%, 1,776),
notes (2.43%, 1,547), letters (1.37%, 872) and reviews
(1.28%, 819). The remaining document types constituted
less than 1% of publications. Table 3 shows the distribution of papers by document type in the last ve decades.
To render the depiction of data clearer, we only considered
percentages of those document types that surpassed 1% of
papers published in each of the periods.
A low percentage of articles was reported in the POMrelated research in the rst decade (36.71%). However,
article were the most dominant document type in the last

543

four decades (19692008), reaching the highest share

(more than 70%) in the last two decades.
Review articles provide a state of the art overview of
a particular topic or eld of research. Further analysis
therefore focuses on review articles. An item is classied
by WoS/K as a review if it meets any of the following
criteria: (1) it cites more than 100 references, (2) it
appears in a review publication or a review section
of a journal, (3) the word review or overview appears in
its title, or (4) the abstract states that it is a review or
survey (The Thomson Corporation, 2007). Only 10 reviews
(1.22%) were published in the rst decade, 17 reviews
(2.08%) in the second decade, 155 (18.93%) in the third
decade, 221 (26.98%) in the fourth decade, and 416
(50.79%) in the last decade. We can see a signicant
increase in review publishing over the ve decades, and
almost 60 review articles were published in 2006, 2007,
and 2008.
Review articles were published in all 20 core POM
journals, but Journal of Productivity Analysis published
only one review. The journal publishing the most review
articles was European Journal of Operational Research
(328 reviews, 40.05%), followed by Journal of Operations
Management (57 reviews, 6.96%), International Journal
of Production Research (56 reviews, 6.84%), OmegaInternational Journal of Management Science (51 reviews,
6.23%), and Operations Research (46 reviews, 5.62%).
These ve journals published over 66% of the review
articles.
The country publishing the most review articles was
the USA (406 reviews, 49.57%), followed by the UK (129
reviews, 15.75%) and Canada (93 reviews, 11.36%). The
remaining countries constituted less than 5%. Hong Kong
was the Asian country publishing the most review articles
(26, 3.23%), followed by India (16, 1.95%), while the
remaining Asian countries constituted less than 2%.
The author with the most review papers published
was Gilbert Laporte (Canada), with 13 review articles
published in total; the authors with the second most
review papers were T.C. Edwin Cheng (Hong Kong) and

Table 2
Percentage trend in research productivity.
D1 (19591968)

D2 (19691978)

D3 (19791988)

D4 (19891998)

D5 (19992008)

Year Documents Annual

published
increase
(%)

Year Documents Annual

published
increase
(%)

Year Documents Annual

published
increase
(%)

Year Documents Annual

published
increase
(%)

Year Documents Annual

published
increase
(%)

1959 173
1960 142
1961 299
1962
174
1963 276
1964 397
1965 547
1966 492
1967 134
1968 330
Total 2,964

1969
87
1970
96
1971 168
1972 149
1973 219
1974 336
1975 1455
1976 541
1977 598
1978 904
Total 4,553

1979
943
1980 1158
1981 1250
1982 1343
1983 1235
1984 1367
1985 1404
1986 1705
1987 1664
1988 1540
Total 13,609

1989 1528
1990 1593
1991 1704
1992 1869
1993 1903
1994 2044
1995 2170
1996 2254
1997 2198
1998 2088
Total 19,351

1999
2112
2000 1987
2001 1993
2002 2127
2003 1944
2004 2220
2005 2274
2006 2613
2007 2919
2008
3110
Total 23,299

1.05
5.30
4.22
3.44
4.08
5.06
1.86
12.08
6.61
0.59*

Note: *Average annual increase.

0.20
1.58
0.42
1.54
2.57
24.58
20.07
1.25
6.72
1.99*

1.58
0.68
0.68
0.79
0.97
0.27
2.21
0.30
0.91
0.49*

0.34
0.57
0.85
0.18
0.73
0.65
0.43
0.29
0.57
0.32*

-0.54
0.03
0.58
0.79
1.18
0.23
1.45
1.31
0.82
0.48*

ARTICLE IN PRESS

46,998
4,385
3,428
3,269
1,776
1,547
872
819
682
63,776

S.K. Goyal (Canada), each publishing 10 review papers; the

rest of the authors published less than 1% of the review
articles.
It has been suggested that review articles receive more
citations. These 819 review articles received 23,944
citations in total, each review article receiving on average
29.24 citations (SD 42.303), and with a high h-index
value of 80. This study thus conrms this commonly
held view that review articles attract more citations
(Seglen, 1997; Weale et al., 2004). The t-test shows that
there is a signicant statistical difference at the 0.00 level
between articles (M 9.46, SD 24.616) and reviews
(F 395.711, p 0.000).

19,351
Total
13,609
Total
4,553
Total
2,964
Total

Note: Bk review book review, correct, A Correction, addition, Editorial editorial material, meeting meeting abstract, proceedings proceedings paper.

23,299
Total

82.96
7.79
3.88
2.53
1.79
1.06
19,329
1,815
903
589
416
247
41.33
36.71
9.82
9.24
2.90

Article
Meeting
Note
Bk review
Letter
Editorial
Correction, A
Others (3)
1,225
1,088
291
274
86
Meeting
Article
Bk review
Letter
Others (7)

2,431
1,044
432
352
157
70
47
20

53.39
22.93
9.49
7.73
3.45
1.54
1.03
0.44

Article
Bk review
Meeting
Note
Letter
Editorial
Review
Others (4)

9,232
1,771
1,000
634
342
310
155
165

67.84
13.01
7.35
4.66
2.51
2.28
1.14
1.21

Article
Proceedings
Bk review
Note
Editorial
Review
Others (10)

14,918
1,613
1,382
466
465
221
286

77.09
8.34
7.14
2.41
2.40
1.14
1.48

Article
Proceedings
Editorial
Bk review
Review
Others (7)

Article
Bk review
Proceedings
Meeting
Editorial
Note
Letter
Review
Others (11)
Total

Docs
Type
%
Docs
Type
%
Docs
Type

Docs

Type

Docs

Type

Docs

Type

All (19592008)
D5 (1999-2008)
D4 (1989-1998)
D3 (1979-1988)
D2 (1969-1978)
D1 (1959-1968)

Table 3
Distribution of papers by document type (19592008).

73.69
6.88
5.38
5.13
2.78
2.43
1.37
1.28
1.07

P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

544

3.4. Most productive authors

44,881 authors from all over the world published an
article in at least one of the 20 core POM journals during
the time period 19592008. Of these, 24,468 papers
(38.69%) were published by a single author, and 23,780
papers (37.61%) were published by two authors. Table 4a
represents the ranked list of the top 20 most productive
authors in POM over the ve decades. From this table,
one notes that the most productive author from the ftyyear period of the study was T.C. Edwin Cheng from The
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, who
published 182 papers. The author ranked second was
Gilbert Laporte from HEC Montreal, Canada, with 159
papers published; the author with the third most
papers was S.K. Goyal from Concordia University,
Canada, with 145 papers; in fourth place was S. Eilon
from the University of London, the UK, with 130 papers
published. Eleven of the top 20 most productive authors
were from the USA, four from Canada and three from
Hong Kong.
The ranked list of the top 20 most productive authors
in ve leading POM journals over the ve decades is
presented as supplementary information in Table 4b. The
ve leading POM journals, selected based on their hindices, are Management Science (141), Operations Research
(117), European Journal of Operational Research (86),
International Journal of Production Research (65) and
Mathematics of Operations Research (61).
The h-index value of the top 20 most productive POM
authors ranged from 8 to 29, of which 10 authors had an
h-index score greater than 20. Table 4a lists in the last
column the h-index scores of the top 20 most productive
POM authors.
The data were further segregated into ve time
periods, each standing for one decade, to facilitate comparison and analysis. Table 5 shows the top ten most
productive authors in the ve decades (19592008).
D.W. Miller from Columbia University compiled 92
book reviews in Management Science in 1968, Abraham
Charnes from the University of Texas, Austin, USA, who
published 31 papers, was the second most productive
author in the rst decade (19591968). S. Eilon from the
University of London, UK, published 39 and 56 papers
in the second and third decades, respectively. In the fourth
decade, Mitsuo Gen from Waseda University, Japan,

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P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

545

Table 4
(a) Top 20 most productive authors in POM (19592008). (b) Top 20 most productive authors in ve leading POM journals (19592008).
Rank Author

Institution

Country Papers % of
63,776

Sum of the times

Cited

Average citation per

item

hindex

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

HEC Montreal
Concordia University
University of London
University of Toronto
California State University, Fullerton
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University
Waseda University
Hong Kong University of Science &
Technology
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Columbia University
University of Texas, Austin
University of Calgary
University of Colorado
University of Texas, Austin
University of Alabama
City University of Hong Kong
Louisiana State University
Columbia University
University of Texas, Austin
Temple University

HK
CA
CA
UK
CA
USA
USA

182
159
145
130
107
106
102

0.29
0.25
0.23
0.20
0.17
0.17
0.16

1,865
3,104
1,463
403
721
1,349
827

10.25
19.52
10.09
3.10
6.74
12.73
8.11

20
30
21
8
15
17
15

JP
HK

93
93

0.15
0.15

866
379

9.31
4.08

16
24

IL
USA
USA
CA
USA
USA
USA
HK
USA
USA
USA
USA

93
92
91
88
87
84
83
83
83
82
79
78

0.15
0.14
0.14
0.14
0.14
0.13
0.13
0.13
0.13
0.13
0.12
0.12

1,932
0
5,638
1,030
3,072
1,333
1,275
714
935
1,748
5,398
290

20.77
0
61.96
11.7
35.31
15.87
15.36
8.6
11.27
21.32
68.33
3.72

24
0
21
17
28
22
20
14
18
24
20
10

Rank Author

Institution

Country Papers % of
30,594

Sum of the times

Cited

Average citation per

item

hindex

(b)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

HEC Montreal
Groupe HEC
University of Texas, Austin
Columbia University
Columbia University
University of Texas, Austin
Concordia University
University of Colorado
AT&T Labs Research
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
University of California, Berkeley

CA
FR
USA
USA
USA
USA
CA
USA
USA
HK
USA

68
66
65
62
59
58
55
52
49
46
44

0.22%
0.22%
0.21%
0.20%
0.19%
0.19%
0.18%
0.17%
0.16%
0.15%
0.14%

1747
6
5213
1512
1,847
5,268
826
1,460
887
801
804

25.69
0.09
80.20
24.39
31.31
90.83
15.02
28.08
18.10
17.41
18.27

22
2
18
21
26
20
16
21
14
12
18

University of California, Los Angeles

Stanford University
Indian Institute of Technology
INSEAD

USA
USA
IN
FR

42
41
41
40

0.14%
0.13%
0.13%
0.13%

1,037
652
225
1,535

24.69
15.90
5.49
38.38

15
13
8
20

University of Texas, Dallas

Stanford University
University of Calgary
Stanford University
Louisiana State University
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University

USA
USA
CA
USA
USA
USA

40
39
39
38
38
38

0.13%
0.13%
0.13%
0.12%
0.12%
0.12%

807
2,679
626
801
386
456

20.17
68.69
16.05
21.08
10.16
12.00

15
22
14
17
13
13

(a)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Cheng, T.C. Edwin

Laporte, Gilbert
Goyal, S.K.
Heilon SH
Berman, Oded
Drezner, Zvi
Sherali, Hanif D.

8
9

Gen, Mitsuo
Lee, Chung-Yee

10

HMehrez, AH.
Miller, D.W.*
Cooper, William W.
Silver, Edward A.
Glover, Fred
Bard, Jonathan F.
Gupta, Jatinder N.D.
Lau, Hon-Shiang
Sarker, Bhaba R.
Whitt, Ward
Charnes, Abraham
Murphy, Frederic H.

11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
20

Laporte, Gilbert
Thiriez, Herve
Charnes, Abraham
Whitt, Ward
Federgruen, Awi
Cooper, William W.
Goyal, S.K.
Glover, Fred
Fishburn, Peter C.
Cheng, T.C. Edwin
Shanthikumar, J.
George
Tang, Christopher S.
Zenios, Stefanos A.
Tiwari, M.K.
Van Wassenhove, Luk
N.
Sethi, Suresh P.
Lee, Hau L.
Silver, Edward A.
Wein, Lawrence M.
Sarker, Bhaba R.
Sherali, Hanif D.

Note: D.W. Miller compiled 92 book reviews in Management Science in 1968, thereafter not ranked in the table.

published 63 papers; T.C. Edwin Cheng from The Hong

Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, published 111
papers in the last decade, maintaining the highest
research production.
Table 6 shows the top 20 most active authors ranked
by h-index. Gilbert Laporte has the highest h-index score,
followed by Hau L. Lee and Fred Glove. Somewhat
surprisingly, some of the most productive authors listed
in Table 4a had relatively low h-index scores. There are 10
authors listed in both Tables 4a and 6: Jonathan F. Bard,

Abraham Charnes, T.C. Edwin Cheng, William W. Cooper,

Fred Glover, S.K. Goyal, Jatinder N.D. Gupta, Gilbert
Laporte, Chung-Yee Lee and Ward Whitt.
3.5. Most productive institution
To assess who actually published in the POM journals,
we analyzed the authors origins in these journals
between 1973 and 2006 (since institutional afliation
data were not added to the WoS/K databases until 1973).

ARTICLE IN PRESS
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P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

Table 5
Top ten most productive authors in the past ve decades (19592008).
Rank D1 (19591968)

D2 (19691978)

D3 (19791988)

D4 (19891998)

D5 (19992008)

Authors

Docs

Authors

Docs

Authors

Docs

Authors

Docs

Authors

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Miller, DW
Charnes, A
Jewell, WS
Cooper, WW
Wagner, HM
Ancker, CJ
Geisler, MA
Herman, R
Dantzig, GB
Fishburn, PC

92
31
19
18
18
17
16
14
13
13

3.10
1.05
0.64
0.61
0.61
0.57
0.54
0.47
0.44
0.44

Eilon, S
Glover, F
Woolsey, G
Charnes, A
Taylor, JG
Klingman, D
Gray, P
Shycon, HN
Vazsonyi, A
Machol, RE
Nahmias, S
Rao, MR
Soland, RM
Thompson, GL

Eilon, S
Goyal, SK
Mehrez, A
Shanthikumar, JG
Drezner, Z
Sherali, HD
Lee, HL
Chakravarty, AK
Ignizio, JP
Rosenblatt, MJ
Woolsey, G

56
43
38
38
35
35
29
26
26
26
26

0.41
0.32
0.28
0.28
0.26
0.26
0.21
0.19
0.19
0.19
0.19

Gen, M
Cheng, TCE
Laporte, G
Goyal, SK
Mehrez, A
Lee, CY
Thiriez, H
Wilson, JM
Murphy, FH
Sarker, BR

63
60
59
46
46
45
45
37
36
35

0.33
0.31
0.30
0.24
0.24
0.23
0.23
0.19
0.19
0.18

Cheng, TCE
111
Laporte, G
86
Berman, O
55
Goyal, SK
47
Lee, CY
45
Sarker, BR
43
Gunasekaran, A 41
Gupta, JND
41
Tiwari, MK
41
Zhu, J
41

Total
of Authors
of papers

251
8.47
2,326
2,964

0.86
0.55
0.48
0.44
0.44
0.40
0.37
0.31
0.31
0.29
0.29
0.29
0.29
0.29
5.58

No.
No.

39
25
22
20
20
18
17
14
14
13
13
13
13
13
254
4,150
4,553

378
2.78
10,201
13,609

472
2.44
16,805
19,351

Docs

%
0.48
0.37
0.24
0.20
0.19
0.18
0.18
0.18
0.18
0.18

551
2.37%
23,409
23,299

Table 6
Top 20 h-index POM researchers (19592008).
Rank

Author

1
2
3
4
5
6

Laporte, Gilbert
HEC Montreal
Lee, Hau L.
Stanford University
Glover, Fred
University of Colorado
Federgruen, Awi
Columbia University
Van Wassenhove, Luk N. INSEAD
Lee, Chung-Yee
Hong Kong University of
Science & Technology
Whitt, Ward
Columbia University
Bard, Jonathan F.
University of Texas, Austin
Gendreau, Michel
Universite de Montreal
Beasley, J. E.
Brunel University
Goyal, S. K.
Concordia University
Cooper, William W.
University of Texas, Austin
Cheng, T. C. Edwin
The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University
Gupta, Jatinder N. D.
University of Alabama
Charnes, Abraham
University of Texas, Austin
Rajendran,
Indian Institute of Technology
Chandrasekharan
Potts, C. N.
University of Southampton
Rosenblatt, Meir J.
Washington University
Shanthikumar, J. George University of California,
Berkeley
Powell, Warren B.
Princeton University

7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

Institution

Country

h-index

Papers

World %

Sum of the times Average citation

cited
per item

CA
USA
USA
USA
FR
HK

30
29
28
26
25
24

159
72
87
71
53
93

0.25
0.11
0.14
0.11
0.08
0.15

3,104
3,484
3,072
1,993
2,010
1,932

19.52
48.39
35.31
28.07
37.92
20.77

USA
USA
CA
UK
CA
USA
HK

24
22
22
22
21
21
20

82
84
62
50
145
91
182

0.13
0.13
0.10
0.08
0.23
0.14
0.29

1,748
1,333
1,581
1,910
1,463
5,638
1,865

21.32
15.87
25.50
38.20
10.09
61.96
10.25

USA
USA
IN

20
20
20

83
79
55

0.13
0.12
0.09

1,275
5,398
987

15.36
68.33
17.95

UK
USA
USA

20
20
19

53
52
72

0.08
0.08
0.11

1,673
1,423
1,049

31.57
27.37
14.57

USA

19

58

0.09

916

15.79

The country of origin of an article was identied by the

country listed in the corresponding authors address.
Many publications had multiple authors. We adopted an
inclusive approach to counting, to better enable evaluation of author productivity. Each institution appearing in
the author list received one credit for an article. When an
article was authored by collaborating institutions from
multiple countries, each country received one count for its
participation, irrespective of the number of collaborating
institutions. For example, Taiwan and the USA would each
receive one credit for an article coauthored by one

Taiwanese institution and two USA institutions. Thus,

the number of credits for an article is subject to variation,
depending on the number of institutional authors and the
number of countries represented among the collaborating
institutions. When institutions collaborate, a single article
is counted more than once.
As shown in Table 7, 17 of the top 20 institutions, which
published the most POM papers were from the USA,
the only three exceptions being Tel-Aviv University in Israel,
the National University of Singapore and Indian Institute
of Technology. The highest h-index score among the

ARTICLE IN PRESS
P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

547

Table 7
Top 20 institution distribution of research productivity (1973-2008)
Rank

Institution name

Country

Papers

World %

Sum of the
times cited

Average
citations per
Item

h-index

Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Georgia Institute of
Technology
Columbia University
Purdue University
University of Michigan
Stanford University
University of Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania State University
University of Wisconsin
Carnegie Mellon University
University of Florida
Tel-Aviv University
Northwestern University
University of California,
Berkeley
University of Maryland
Ohio State University
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University
University of Illinois
National University of
Singapore
Indian Institute of Technology

USA

854

1.42

20,094

23.53

69

436

USA

732

1.21

9,824

13.42

45

263

USA
USA
USA
USA
USA
USA
USA
USA
USA
IL
USA
USA

704
702
657
632
624
621
616
538
521
508
506
470

1.17
1.16
1.09
1.05
1.03
1.03
1.02
0.89
0.86
0.84
0.84
0.78

10,833
10,321
10,401
14,823
15,252
5,993
7,581
12,930
5,709
5,532
9,011
7,380

15.39
14.70
15.83
23.46
24.44
9.65
12.31
23.99
10.96
10.85
17.81
15.70

51
48
48
59
58
35
39
53
37
32
47
38

194
311
1,193
667
673
383
339
1125
213
242
633
429

USA
USA
USA

469
467
457

0.78
0.77
0.76

6,034
7,336
3,588

12.87
15.71
7.85

36
44
28

545
217
86

USA
SG

451
429

0.75
0.71

5,751
3,594

12.75
8.38

35
27

382
311

IN

424

0.70

4,102

9.67

31

97

2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

Times cited of
most cited paper

Table 8
Number of papers from top 20 countries (1973-2008)
Rank

Country/
territory

Papers

World %

Sum of the
times cited

Average citations
per item

h-index

Times cited of most

cited paper

Region

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

USA
UK
Canada
Netherlands
Taiwan
France
Germany
Israel

29,109
6,701
4,159
2,099
1,734
1,610
1,601
1,527

43.21
9.95
6.17
3.12
2.57
2.39
2.38
2.27

341,154
44,255
46,649
16,067
11,973
16,554
14,302
15,374

11.73
6.60
11.22
7.65
6.90
10.28
8.93
10.07

160
66
78
47
38
50
48
49

2,208
1,115
556
258
76
1,049
248
389

9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Hong Kong
South Korea
Japan
India
Italy
Spain
Belgium
Australia
Turkey
Peoples R
China
Singapore
Greece
Others (105)
No data

1,317
1,285
1,224
1,164
1,138
1,126
980
860
828
746

1.96
1.91
1.82
1.73
1.69
1.67
1.45
1.28
1.23
1.11

9,526
8,975
9,242
9,756
8,317
6,065
12,690
6,936
5,334
3,808

7.23
6.98
7.55
8.38
7.31
5.39
12.95
8.07
6.44
5.10

35
35
39
42
38
28
51
34
30
27

261
136
174
177
165
109
308
271
89
136

America
Europe
America
Europe
Asia
Europe
Europe
Middle
East
Asia
Asia
Asia
Asia
Europe
Europe
Europe
Oceania
Asia
Asia

695
578
6,882
5,665

1.03
0.86
10.22

5,364
3,470

7.72
6.00

32
26

311
85

Asia
Europe

19
20

top 20 institutions was 69 of Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT), followed by Stanford University with
an h-index of 59 and published 632 papers. The top
nine institutions published papers greater than 1%, respectively.

3.6. Most productive countries

In total, 44,881 authors from 125 countries had
publications in the 20 chosen POM journals over the ve
decades, although 5,665 records did not contain data in

ARTICLE IN PRESS
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P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

Table 9
Geographic distribution of research productivity in the past four decades (19732008).
Rank D2 (19731978)

D3 (19791988)

D4 (19891998)

D5 (19992008)

Country/territory Papers World % Country/territory Papers World % Country/territory Papers World % Country/territory Papers World %
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

USA
UK
Canada
Israel
Netherlands
Germany
Australia
Japan
India
Belgium
Others (39)
No data
Total (49)

2,950
335
294
97
50
45
33
31
30
29
169
691
4,553

64.79
7.36
6.46
2.13
1.10
0.99
0.72
0.68
0.66
0.64
3.71
15.18

USA
UK
Canada
Netherlands
Israel
Germany
France
Belgium
India
Japan
Others (66)
No data
Total (76)

6,742
2,254
817
562
401
339
218
214
203
180
1,632
993
13,609

49.54
16.56
6.00
4.13
2.95
2.49
1.60
1.57
1.49
1.32
11.99
7.30

USA
UK
Canada
Netherlands
Israel
South Korea
Japan
France
Germany
Taiwan
Other (82)
No data
Total (92)

10,137 52.38
1,714
8.86
1,411
7.29
597
3.09
529
2.73
498
2.57
483
2.50
440
2.27
433
2.24
421
2.18
4,263 22.03
830
4.29
19,351

USA
UK
Canada
Taiwan
Hong Kong
France
Spain
Netherlands
Germany
South Korea
Others (94)
No data
Total (104)

9101 39.06
2447 10.50
1635 7.02
1290 5.54
993 4.26
927 3.98
908 3.90
890 3.82
781 3.35
728 3.12
8,013 34.39
377 1.62
23,249

Note: UK includes the publications from England, Scotland, Wales and North Ireland. Germany includes the publications from FED REP GER, GER DEM REP,
and West Germany.

this eld. The USA, the UK and Canada had the highest
absolute numbers of publications; these three countries
together accounted for 59.33% of world research production in POM. The top ve countries accounted for about
65% of world POM publications, and the top ten countries
accounted for 75.93%. Table 8 shows the top 20 countries
with 500 or more publications over the ve decades.
A new ranking, calculated according to the h-index,
showed signicant variation with regard to the absolute
count between the most productive 20 countries. Some
examples were Belgium, India, Australia, and Singapore,
which because of the higher average-citations-per-item of
their articles (12.95, 8.38, 8.07, and 7.72, respectively)
outperformed countries with a greater number of publications (Table 8). On the other hand, the rank of h-index
values for Taiwan (38) and Hong Kong (35) was lower
relative to ranking by number of publications.
Table 9 shows the respective trends of the top ten
countries in their absolute and percentage values over the
four periods analyzed. The country that maintained the
highest research productivity over the four periods was
the USA, accounting for 64.79% in the second decade, with
this percentage decreasing to 49.54%, 52.38%, and 39.06%
in the last three decades.
The second leading country in number of documents
published over the four decades was the UK. In contrast to
the USA, the UK accounted for 7.36% of all documents
published in the rst period, increasing rapidly to 16.56%
in the second period, subsequently dropping to 8.86% in
the third period and again increasing to 10.50% in the last
decade. The third leading country over the four decades
was Canada, with a mean percentage slightly lower than
7% over the four decades.
Israel and the Netherlands registered a considerable
level of research activity in the rst three periods.
Although Israels relative weight was higher than the
Netherlands in the rst period, its research productivity
has declined since the second period. Taiwan and Hong
Kong have improved their standing, moving into fourth
and fth place in the period 19992008.

There was an obvious decrease in US authors in the 20

core POM journals, from 64.79% in 19731978 to 39.06% in
19992008. Conversely, contributions from other countries
including Canada, France, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, the
Netherlands, South Korea, and Taiwan have increased
consistently, although each increase constituted less than
10%. Additionally, attention must be drawn to the upward
trend in evolution of the other countries that produced
publications on POM. Table 9 shows a signicant increase
in the number of countries in each period: in the rst
period, only 49 countries contributed to the POM journals,
doubling to 104 countries in the last period, whereas the
contribution of authors from the countries beyond the top
20 increased from 3.71% to 34.39% in the past four decades.

3.7. Research collaborations

By focusing analysis on the authors of the papers, this
research enabled collaborations established by these
researchers to be ascertained. In the rst decade
(19591968), a total of 922 unique pairs of authors and
two major clusters can be observed. The largest of these
was made up of the researchers, Abraham Charnes,
William W. Cooper, D.B. Learner, J.K. Devoe, K. Kortanek,
and W. Raike, and Abraham Charnes and William W.
Cooper were responsible for setting up the greatest
number of collaborations. The second cluster in terms of
size was formed by R. Herman, R.W. Rothery and D.C.
Gazis. The remaining clusters were very small basically,
formed by only two authors.
In the second decade (19691978), six major clusters
were obtained, the rst cluster, like the previous decade,
continued to be the most productive and was formed by
Abraham Charnes, William W. Cooper, T. Granot and
Daniel Granot. The rst two authors had also appeared
together in the preceding decade. D. Klingman, Fred
Glover, Robert Russell, and J. Hultz participated in the
second cluster.

ARTICLE IN PRESS
3.42
2.80
2.04
1.77
1.72
1.16
1.13
1.08
1.06
1.06
17.23
426
315
291
261
202
194
169
155
146
144
2303
Manufacturing system
Algorithm problem
Scheduling problem
Production system
Flexible manufacturing
Flexible system
Solving problem
Heuristic problem
Approach problem
Decision support

Supply chain
Algorithm problem
Scheduling problem
Manufacturing system
Genetic algorithm
Solving problem
Production system
Heuristic problem
Neural network
Case study
2.81
2.08
1.92
1.72
1.33
1.28
1.12
1.02
0.96
0.95
15.21
1.51
1.25
1.25
0.97
0.91
0.87
0.87
0.83
0.82
0.82
10.10
142
117
117
91
85
82
82
78
77
77
948
Algorithm problem
Production system
Manufacturing system
Scheduling problem
Inventory system
Decision system
Decision support
Support system
Flexible manufacturing
Solving problem
2.04
1.84
1.72
1.67
1.39
1.35
1.31
1.06
1.02
0.98
14.38
50
45
42
41
34
33
32
26
25
24
352
Management science
Algorithm problem
Queue system
Solution problem
Transportation problem
Integer programming
Programming problem
Optimal policy
Solving problem
Location problem
22
21
21
20
17
16
14
13
13
12
169
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Programming problem
Optimal policy
Solution problem
Queue service
Optimal inventory
Queue system
Queue time
Algorithm problem
Management science
Inventory problem

2.00
1.91
1.91
1.82
1.55
1.46
1.28
1.18
1.18
1.09
15.39

%
%
No.
Title words
No.
Title words

Title words

No.

D3 (19791988): 9387 papers

D2 (19691978): 2448 papers
D1 (19591968): 1098 papers
Rank

Table 10
Top 10 keywords in titles in the past ve decades (19592008).

673
552
401
348
338
229
223
213
209
208
3394

Title words
No.
Title words

No.

D5 (19992008): 19698 papers

D4 (19891998): 15139 papers

P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

549

In the third decade (19791988) a total of 212 clusters

can be observed. The largest of clusters were led by D.
Kingman, Allen L. Soyster, Bernard W. Taylor, and D.H.R.
Price. The second cluster was formed by D. Klingman,
Randy Glover, John Mote, Ned Freed, Nelson Phillips, N.V.
Phillips, and D. Steiger. Researchers D. Klingman and
Randy Glover had participated in the same cluster in the
preceding decade. The other three were new clusters
emerging in this decade.
In the fourth decade (19891998), the largest four clusters
were led by Gilbert Laporte, Mitsuo Gen, and Herbert
Moskowitz and Luk N. Van Wassenhove, with 15, 14, 13,
and 10 other authors, respectively. The remaining clusters
were relatively larger than the previous two decades.
In the last decade (19992008), T.C. Edwin Cheng, who
coincided in the previous period, grew to be the
researcher who collaborated most intensely. The other
clusters led by Gilbert Laporte, F.T.S. Chan, and Oded
Berman were formed by more than 10 authors.

3.8. Analysis of research topics

A simple but useful approach to analyzing the research
topics is to examine the way that authors selected title
words for their articles. Title word co-occurrences are
counts of the frequency with which two words appear
together in an article title, and their analysis enables us to
say something about the way ideas support and interact
with each other. Table 10 lists the top 10 co-occurrence
words in article titles. The most widely studied research
topics in the rst decade were programming problems,
optimal policy and solution problems; in the second
decade they were management science, algorithm problem, queue system; in the third decade algorithm
problem, production system; in the fourth decade manufacturing system, algorithm problem, scheduling problem; in the fth decade supply chain, algorithm problem,
scheduling problem.
Supply chain, dened as a network of facilities linked
by a ow of goods, information, and funds (Chan et al.,
2008), has gained increased attention from scholars from
a variety of disciplines over the last decade. Furthermore,
practitioners have begun to adopt and adapt innovative
supply chain-management techniques that improve rm
performance and customer service levels. For instance, a
special issue of International Journal of Production Economics is devoted to publishing the latest and signicant
research on fashion retail supply chains (Choi and Chen,
2008; Kurata and Yue, 2008; Vaagen and Wallace, 2008).

4. Discussion
The USA was the most productive country in terms of
absolute number of publications in POM. However, when
normalized to population size, smaller afuent countries,
such as Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Netherlands
were more productive (Table 11). In the last 10 years, the
largest increases in research productivity related to POM
were found in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Spain and Germany.

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550

P.-N. Hsieh, P.-L. Chang / Int. J. Production Economics 120 (2009) 540551

Table 11
Number of publications in the 20 POM journals per million inhabitants.
Rank

Country/
territory*

Papers/
million
inhabitants

Papers

Inhabitants
(million)*

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

Israel
Hong Kong
Singapore
Netherlands
Canada
UK
USA
Belgium
Finland
Denmark
Taiwan
New Zealand
Sweden
Greece
Norway
Switzerland
Australia
Austria
Portugal
Spain

214.70
187.64
150.82
126.10
125.22
109.95
95.81
94.19
89.23
80.95
75.65
73.08
60.69
53.90
53.61
44.58
40.94
39.49
35.59
27.81

1,527
1,317
695
2,099
4,159
6,701
29,109
980
468
444
1,734
305
549
578
249
338
860
324
380
1,126

7.11
7.02
4.61
16.65
33.21
60.94
303.82
10.40
5.24
5.48
22.92
4.17
9.05
10.72
4.64
7.58
21.01
8.21
10.68
40.49

Note: *July 2008 est., from CIA: The World Factbook (HUhttps://
www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.htmlUH).

The study only analyzed publications in English,

because it is well known that English is the international
scientic language. ISI databases mainly include journals
in the English language, and this renders it difcult for
journals in other languages to attain a high level of
impact. Moreover, it is interesting to observe that when
we determine research production in relation to population size, the four leaders are not English-speaking
countries. The supremacy of small North-European countries when publications are considered in terms of
population size is a well-known fact (May, 1997).
This nding generally concurs with Young, Baird and
Pullmans work, while it generally contradicts Malhotra
and Khers work. More signicant is the nding that a
large percentage of institutions with the highest levels of
productivity in POM research are outside the USA. This
nding conicts heavily with the ndings of Malhotra and
Kher; the other two studies were intentionally constrained to US institutions. Upon further analysis, this
latter nding may be attributed to a trend toward the
globalization of research efforts in the POM discipline.
Given that only 20 POM journals were considered, this
analysis lacks the ability to guarantee an exhaustive
collection of all relevant POM articles. However, the
authors believe that a large majority of relevant articles
were found. The resulting nal set of 63,776 articles
provides a sufcient sample to reasonably investigate
research productivity.

Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful for the constructive comments
of the referees on an earlier version of this paper.

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