Remember when Árni suggested to debate articles in public, as a sort of open source review? The Journal of Operations Management has indeed taken on the idea and publishes articles, and ideas for articles, in their operations and supply management forum. Some of the articles did already generate quite a number of (high quality) comments. Today’s topic is “too much theory, not enough understanding”. Time to log on and contribute to the debate!
Gyöngyi
Here comes the first hurdle to an academic contribution (journal article, conference paper): the abstract. Varying in length and structure, it is the teaser one has to write to water the mouth of the reader. There are lots of good guides to abstract writing (see e.g. Emerald’s collection of “how to guides“); here is also a “fill in the blanks” version 
Gyöngyi
It seems that academia has followed the “publish or perish” mantra since time immemorial. (Which reminds me, there is even a programme called “Publish or Perish” that analyses academic citations via Google Scholar).
But just how do publications in academic journals (and the quality of these journals vs. number of publications) relate to getting promoted in academia? AMA has just opened a discussion group around a recent article in the Journal of Marketing that revisits this question. In this article, Seggie and Griffith (2009) draw a link not only between publications and promotion in academia (which in logistics has been established in a number of Vellenga et al. papers) but also between publications in “good” journals (i.e. journal rankings) and promotions at/to “good” universities (i.e. university rankings). As for the marketing discipline, it appears that scholars from highly ranked academic institutions publish more in the top marketing journals.
My question would be whether this finding could be replicated in SCM. One of the problems here is the persistence of functional silos in academia. We have rankings in logistics, purchasing, operations management, … (you name it) but as Kovács, Spens and Vellenga (2008) found, these “academic tribes” differ substantially in their views on journal rankings. What is more, which are the “top academic institutions” in our discipline…?
Gyöngyi
Too many deadlines? Yes, that’s what January is all about, it’s a peak of deadlines for SCM-related conferences and special issues in journals – not to speak of the journal special issues that are linked to conferences.
- The Humanitarian Logistic Symposium of CCHLI is linked to a (yet to be announced) special issue of IJPDLM (yep, the deadline was on Jan 5),
- CSCMP Europe to a special issue of JBL (deadline today, Jan 9),
- NOFOMA to IJPDLM (deadline Jan 12)
- POMS to POM (deadline Jan 15)
- EUROMA to IJOPM (deadline Jan 16)…
… and that’s only the conferences with a deadline in January. Plus there are conferences that also have a deadline in January but are not all that visibly linked to journals. And special issues that are not related to conferences. Phew!
Gyöngyi
There are many who claim to be first, having written an entire “book” on humanitarian logistics. If you search for it on Amazon, you’d find that there are a few in the publishing process, e.g. Tomasini & van Wassenhove’s long-awaited overview (that should finally be commercially available in Apr 2009). Just in December 2008, two doctoral dissertations were published in humanitarian logistics: by Ramina Samii and Sabine Schulz. Ramina’s thesis presents a number of case studies and a typology of partnerships of humanitarian organisations, while Sabine’s thesis looks at the concept of co-operation from the perspective of performance measurement. Whether first or not, they are definitely worth the reading.
Gyöngyi
