The devolution of OR/MS: Implications from a statistical content analysis of papers in flagship journals

Ackoff has decried the ‘devolution’ of OR/MS, Corbett and Van Wassenhove have spoken of its ‘natural drift,’ and a sociologist has described its ‘regression’ as typifying that of other learned professions. To shed light on these views, the authors undertook a detailed survey of a segment of the OR/MS literature, with particular focus on the space in flagship journals devoted to theory on the one hand and applications on the other. While the literature of OR/MS contains many articles and texts with the word applciation in the title and the word data in the text, the definitions and uses of these terms are not precise. The claimed applications differ in degree and the actual data differ in kind. To encompass these different meanings the authors used a five-point scale to classify articles in the 1962 and 1992 volumes of Operations Research and Management Science and the 1972 and 1992 volumes of Interfaces. The resulting statistical analyses shed considerable light on the direction that OR/MS is taking and raise questions about its appropriateness. Finally, the paper raises fundamental questions about the direction that OR/MS should take and the roles that its journals should play in pursuing this direction.