An assessment of world-wide research productivity in production and operations management

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 significant growth in POM research productivity over the time period 1959 to 2008. The most productive authors in these five 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 five 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.