In writing this editorial we note that we have now moved into our second term as joint-editors and can report that year-on-year we have a good flow of new papers arriving and this has led to Volume 58 containing many outstanding papers. A total of 701 papers were submitted in 2006, but only 158 papers were published in 2007. Expressing these two numbers as a percentage, 23%, gives a very rough measure of the acceptance rate for papers and a guide to how tough editors and referees need to be.
We have published 37 Case Oriented Papers in Volume 58, excluding papers in three Special Issues. This is a pleasing statistic, with the number of Case Oriented papers, being equal to that of Volume 57, but whereas that volume only omitted papers from one Special Issue, for this year three were published. A number of these Special Issue papers were also case-oriented. The editors like to include as many practical papers as possible that do describe a complete or ongoing piece of OR, so as always we are keen to publish as many high-quality case studies as possible and encourage authors to submit them to the journal. We urge practitioners to generate such papers and to encourage colleagues to do so. In the past, readers of the journal expected to hear about the work of the major OR groups from the papers that appeared describing projects—successes and more modest outcomes—of these groups. We are also pleased that the journal continues to rise in recently published statistics on citation count and the associated Impact Factor.
We have published three Special Issues this last year: Operational Research in Health, Problem Structuring Methods II, and Risk Based Methods for Supply Chain Planning and Management. The previous special issue on Problem Structuring Methods attracted a lot of interest, and it has been good to see more papers appearing on this important topic. This year we look forward to a special issue on OR in Government. Echoing remarks above, with the Government Operational Research service being one of the largest OR groups in the UK it is important that we are able to read about some of their projects and equally important for those who work in that sector to voice their opinions.
We have also published sets of Book Reviews, thanks to our Assistant Editor for book reviews, Professor Uwe Aickelin, and Viewpoints, now handled by Dr Aris Syntetos, our other Assistant Editor. The Journal of Simulation launched last year as an offspring of this journal, has now become more established and the family of journals published by Palgrave for the Society is thriving.
With the ongoing success of the journal comes a steady stream of submitted papers, a proportion of which are accepted for publication. This means that a backlog of papers awaiting publication remains on the Advanced Online Publication system. We are anxious that the buffer stock does not become excessive, so issue lengths in 2007 increased and will do so in 2008, particularly in the first half of the year.
As always it would not be possible to produce this journal without help from many teams of people. We thank the Editorial Administrator, Sarah Parry and the other staff of the Operational Research Society, including recent arrival Gavin Blackett, and staff at our publisher, Palgrave, especially Mariam Hasan, Jane Torr, David Williams and Di Owen. All these people help run the journal on a day-to-day basis and contribute ultimately to its success with the readership. Thanks also go to the members of the International Advisory Board who offer us advice and support from time to time, but do so at arm's length.
We hope that you have enjoyed the papers in the journal over the past year and will continue to do so with Volume 59. We thank our authors for supplying papers and offer sincere thanks to the many hard-working referees who give so generously of their time. We will be listing the referees who reviewed in 2007 in a future issue. Of course the readers who study and cite papers in JORS are our mainstay and deserve our thanks.
Please note that the first paper in this issue (Poojari, Lucas and Mitra: Robust solutions and risk measures for a supply chain planning problem under uncertainty) is a paper from November's Special Issue on Risk Based Methods for Supply Chain Planning and Management. This was inadvertently missed out from the November 2007 Special Issue, for which we apologize, especially as the paper is that written by the editors of the Special Issue.
