Time out of mind: Subben's checklist revisited: A partial description of the development of quantitative OR papers over a period of 25 years

TL;DR

This paper analyzes 25 years of publication trends in the INFORMS journal Operations Research, revealing evolving research focus, citation patterns, and the impact of structured checklists on paper influence.

Contribution

It provides a detailed longitudinal analysis of research development, citation behavior, and the role of checklists in shaping highly cited operations research papers.

Findings

References and literature surveys decrease over time.

Motivational and modeling sections increase in length.

High citation papers tend to utilize Subben's checklist more extensively.

Abstract

This short paper aims to investigate some of the historical developments of one classic, well-cited and highly esteemed scientific journal in the domain of quantitative operations research - namely the INFORMS journal Operations Research - over a period of 25 years between 1981 and 2006. As such this paper, and the journal in question, represents one representative attempt to analyze - for the purpose of possible future generalization - how research production has evolved, and evolves, over time. Among the general developments that we think we can trace are that (a) the historical overviews (i.e., literature surveys) in the articles, as well as the list of references, somewhat counter-intuitively shrink over time, while (b) the motivating and modelling parts grow. We also attempt to characterize - in some detail - the appearance and character, over time, of the most cited, as well as the least cited, papers over the years studied. In particular, we find that many of the least cited papers are quite imbalanced. For example, some of them include one main section only, and the least cited papers also have shorter reference lists. We also analyse the articles' utilization of important buzz words representing the constitutive parts of an OR journal paper, based on Subben's checklist (Larsson and Patriksson, 2014, 2016). Based on a word count of these buzz words we conclude through a citation study, utilizing a collection of particularly highly or little cited papers, that there is a quite strong positive correlation between a journal paper being highly cited and its degree of utilization of this checklist.