Looking Back and Moving Forward: 50 years of the Journal of Supply Chain Management
本文是《供应链管理杂志》50周年纪念刊的社论，回顾了期刊从1965年创刊至今的发展历程、2008年重新定位后的变化，并展望了供应链管理学科的未来研究方向。
This issue marks the 50th volume, and year, of the publication of the Journal of Supply Chain Management. As such, this is an opportune moment to look back at the last 50 years and the more recent 2008–13 time period since the Journal's repositioning. It is also an opportunity to prospectively consider our steps as we move ahead as a scholarly journal and as a discipline. In doing so, we introduce the papers that appear in this 50th anniversary issue, and consider the current state and the future of research in supply management, logistics, and the broader supply chain management discipline. In addition, we provide our own perspectives concerning the future direction of supply chain management research. The Journal of Supply Chain Management was first published in 1965 under the title of the Journal of Purchasing. The impetus for the creation of the Journal came from purchasing management academics, who recognized at the time a need for a scholarly journal to serve as an outlet for purchasing research, to broaden its appeal and impact and to enhance the legitimacy of purchasing as a profession and a scholarly discipline. The Journal's founding Editor, Dr. Harold Fearon, played a pivotal role in working with the National Association of Purchasing Agents (now the Institute for Supply Management, or ISM) in demonstrating the value and viability of creating the Journal. Dr. Fearon continues to serve the Journal as a member of its Advisory Board, as do Donald Dobler (editor from 1980–96 and editor emeritus), Phil Carter (editor from 1997–2001 and editor emeritus) and Alvin Williams (editor from 2002–07 and editor emeritus). In 1999, the name of the Journal was changed to the Journal of Supply Chain Management to reflect, “… the increasing emphasis on supply chain management as the overarching paradigm for research in purchasing and supply” (Carter, 1999, p. 2). Drs. Craig Carter, Lisa Ellram, and Lutz Kaufmann assumed the editorship of JSCM and began to manage the review process in March 2007. This allowed the editorial team to be responsible for all content from the first issue of 2008 (Volume 44, Issue 1) onward. At the time of this transition, the editorial team was charged by ISM with the mission of making JSCM THE journal of choice among supply chain management scholars. In response to this charge, the team made a number of substantial changes to JSCM. An Advisory Board was created, consisting of thought leaders in the broad supply chain management discipline. The members of JSCM's Advisory Board are not only thought leaders in the discipline, but serve as key resources who are actively engaged in supporting the Journal. The Journal's review process was also transformed through the creation of an Associate Editor (AE) Board. The use of AEs in the review process allows JSCM to provide authors with more rigorous and constructive feedback, as AEs can be assigned to manuscripts based on their specific areas of expertise, and was seen as a necessary step given the anticipated increase in submissions. In addition, the Journal's Review Board was significantly expanded during this repositioning period. The Journal's physical appearance changed beginning with the first issue of 2008, to match its stature and mission of being a premier scholarly journal. An online manuscript submission and processing platform, Manuscript Central, was developed and implemented in 2009. This has allowed for increased transparency for authors, Editors, and Associate Editors concerning the status of submitted papers. Finally, an application was made to Thomson Reuters to have JSCM included in the Web of Knowledge (formerly the ISI). The Journal was accepted and included in the Social Sciences Citation Index beginning with its 2008 content, with its first impact factor published in 2010. We believe that these strategies, along with the truly amazing buy-in of the members of our Advisory, Associate Editor, and Review Boards and the broader community of supply chain management scholars, have allowed us to achieve JSCM's mission. The Journal has made tremendous strides over the past several years and has consequently developed a record of sustained performance, impact, and global reach. JSCM has been ranked first or second among supply chain and operations management journals for the past 3 years based on its Thomson Reuters impact factor. This also places JSCM within the top 10–15 percent across all 174 management journals that are included in the Web of Knowledge. While this is only one metric, it provides evidence that papers published in the Journal are significantly impacting subsequent research in the discipline. As another example of the Journal's impact, articles published in JSCM have received the prestigious Emerald Citations of Excellence Award for 2012 (Roth, Tsay, Pullman, & Gray, 2008) and 2013 (Pagell & Wu, 2009). This award is given to the 50 most outstanding and highest impact articles of the 15,000 articles published by the top 300 management journals. Emerald notes that in making this decision, it assesses impact based on “citations, usage, inclusion of research in courseware, media comment, implementation in practice, transformation of research for new audiences, (and) awards,” (http://www.emeraldinsight.com/authors/impact/index.htm, accessed October 15, 2013). The Journal of Supply Chain Management publishes research conducted by many of the leading scholars in the supply chain management discipline, as well as thought leaders from related disciplines whose work touches upon and overlaps with supply chain management, such as relationship marketing, strategic management, social network analysis, and economics. While the mission of the Journal is not to be cross-functional in terms of its research approach, it is the mission of JSCM to be the journal of choice not only within the core supply chain management discipline, but outside of the discipline for scholars who are engaging in supply chain management research. This broad reach extends to the membership of our Advisory, Associate Editor, and Review Boards, which include the top scholars from a variety of disciplines and highly ranked universities worldwide. Over one third of the authors of papers published between 2008 and 2013 are from outside of the United States, as are over one quarter of our Review Board members. Lutz Kaufmann, Xiande Zhao, and Tom Callarman serve as our European and Asian Editors and have helped to increase the global reach of JSCM. The number of submissions has more than tripled since 2007. At the time that we finished writing this editorial, we had received more than 250 submissions and were on track to receive approximately 300 submissions in total for 2013. Commensurate with the rapid increase in submissions, we added a Co-Editor-in-Chief, Chad Autry, in 2012 and have continued to carefully grow our Review and Associate Editor Boards, by inviting the best ad hoc reviewers to join the Review Board and the best reviewers to become Associate Editors. Despite this phenomenal increase in submissions, the review process has continued to operate efficiently, with average first decision processing times in 2013 of 2.36 days in the case of desk rejections and 75.02 days for papers that were sent out for peer review. More importantly, we continue to offer substantive and constructive reviews to authors. These results are largely due to the diligence of our Associate Editors and Reviewers, and without a doubt the amazing work of Lynn Marstiller, who has been the behind-the-scenes oil that has kept the review process running so smoothly. Our acceptance rates have been below 8.2 percent since 2008. While this is a measure that we certainly track, we do not have explicit goals surrounding this metric. For example, when Special Topic Forum (STF) Editors have asked us “how many” papers they can publish within an STF, our answer has consistently been to let manuscript quality and contribution be the criteria by which they decide. Similarly, we ask our reviewers and Associate Editors to use these same criteria when making their decisions. Finally, while these are all tangible indicators of JSCM's ascendance to the level of an “A” journal, perhaps the ultimate test is to simply be able to place a copy of the Journal on the desk of a colleague, department chair, or business school dean and tell the colleague that the Journal of Supply Chain Management is an elite journal in your discipline. We believe that your colleague will agree. Carter and Ellram (2003) performed a critical and rigorous review of the work published in the first 35 years of the Journal, examining the content, methodology, and theoretical approach of articles published during that time period. They also provided recommendations for future research, encouraging greater development and testing of theory, including inductive studies, theory building, and greater triangulation of research. We have recently applied a similar approach to examine the content appearing in JSCM during the 2008–13 time period. We chose this 6-year period because it represents content published in JSCM since its repositioning and because it provides a reasonably representative basis for the content, quality, and contribution of articles that will be published in future issues of the Journal. We used three of Carter and Ellram's dimensions—type of research, research design, and analysis technique—and added a fourth dimension—theoretical lens—to assess the papers that were published in JSCM during the 2008–13 time period (for more information about these dimensions, see Carter & Ellram, 2003 and Mentzer & Kahn, 1995). Two coders independently coded each article across these four dimensions. The initial intercoder agreement rate ranged from 94 percent to 98 percent across the dimensions. Initial disagreements were settled through discussion between the coders. We present our findings in the following paragraphs. As shown in Table 1, JSCM has seen a substantial shift in the nature of the research that has been published during the 2008–13 time period, compared with the 1965–99 time period examined by Carter and Ellram (2003). During this earlier time period, much of what the Journal published was normative, focusing on current practices and what could be done to improve them. Exploratory studies were also of significant interest, given that the field of purchasing was still a very new and emerging area of research inquiry. Conceptual theory building was relatively rare in the early years of the Journal and was not even considered as a separate category in Carter and Ellram's (2003) study. Another significant category in the earlier years of the Journal was methodological articles. These articles included applied methodologies that could be used by practitioners as well as a review of research methodologies used in the field of supply management. While these three categories have all declined significantly, there are three categories that have either emerged or grown significantly in the past 5 years. Given the increased methodological rigor of articles accepted in the Journal of Supply Chain Management since its repositioning, it is not surprising that hypothesis testing is the largest category in the past 6 years, representing over 50 percent of the articles published versus less than 10 percent in the early years of the Journal. This shift has been occurring in the broader supply chain management discipline as well, as hypothesis testing has been replacing less rigorous types of exploratory research. Conceptual theory building has emerged as a category in and of itself since 2008. In the prior review of published articles, some of these articles may have been included in the exploratory category. However, given the great interest of the Journal in contributing to theory building in supply chain management, this category has emerged as an important area of contribution for the Journal. In addition, the exploratory work continues, accounting for about 17 percent of the Journal's papers today. However, the nature of these exploratory articles is quite different. The exploratory articles included in JSCM today employ rigorous and often qualitative analyses that demonstrate empirical validity. While some of the papers published in the Journal prior to this 6-year period also met the criterion of empirical validity, it was not a requirement as it is today. The research design of studies published in JSCM has also changed significantly in the past 6 years (see Table 2). As has been the case with much of the research conducted in the supply chain and operations management area, surveys continue to be the most common method of research design. However, survey research in general is experiencing a decline as it becomes increasingly difficult to gain access and participation of relevant audiences in cross-sectional surveys. Conceptual theory building has rapidly gained traction, perhaps in part due to the Journal's call for such efforts, including the publication of a conceptual theory building discussion forum in 2011. As shown in Table 2, archival and secondary data account for approximately the same proportion of papers as they did in the past although the nature of these articles tends to be quite different. Due to the increased availability of many excellent databases and the evolution of data mining, the archival data articles that the Journal sees today tend to utilize a larger number of theoretically selected variables. We have also seen the emergence of a new category of research design referred to as systematic literature reviews, including meta-analyses. As our discipline has matured and the number of publications available for analysis has increased, the application of such a methodologically rigorous design has begun to allow researchers to use large, multistudy samples to address interesting research questions and further our understanding of supply chain management phenomena. While laboratory studies and experiments still represent a very small proportion of the total studies included in the Journal of Supply Chain Management, we expect this research design to become more prevalent as a complement to the other research designs displayed in Table 2. Due to the changing landscape of data analysis techniques employed by supply chain management researchers, we did not make a direct comparison to the 1965–99 time period. The analysis techniques employed in papers published in the 2008–13 time period are shown in Table 3. The “Other” category included analyses such as logistic regression, hazard rate analysis, and latent class segmentation. In general, there is a movement toward much more rigorous analysis techniques. These are not limited to quantitative techniques but include rigorous qualitative analysis techniques. In the analysis performed by Carter and Ellram (2003), the application of specific theories was not analyzed. Making a solid theoretical contribution by extending and deepening the understanding of existing theory or building new theory is an important requirement for papers that have been published in the Journal of Supply Chain Management in the past 6 years. Table 4 illustrates that papers published in the Journal from 2008 onward draw on a wide variety of theories from a great number of disciplines. For example, the Other category encompassed a very large number of theories from management, and We this as a in that it the of researchers to employ the most relevant and theory to their research and also provides evidence that our discipline is on a broad of theories than on a small of The editorial team continues to believe that there is a role for the Journal of Supply Chain Management in supporting theory development to the area of supply chain management as well as theory from other disciplines to supply chain phenomena. In this 50th anniversary issue of the Journal of Supply Chain Management, we supply management, in and the broader of supply chain management as three substantive areas to In addition, we the interest in supply chain management among practitioners and researchers and upon as a fourth area to include in this 50th anniversary We leading scholars to or the literature in these areas and provide their perspectives of that future research In these scholars, we selected researchers who have performed work in each of these substantive areas and who have had a with and of JSCM in on these we Lisa Ellram and chain Tom supply chain and of these authors in engaged other authors in their research and their papers. of the papers were to a peer and all papers were and prior to Ellram and a of perspectives of supply chain a discipline, and the period since the supply chain management first in and an They examine the evolution of supply chain management has been in the based on of research. is that while is occurring concerning supply chain management is there is still such that scholarly research and application are Ellram and that than to a more name for supply chain management be as a this there are many areas of including logistics, management and Carter, and a of surrounding research, samples and over The of their is to and test a of the among and and to the empirical among a broader of that have been examined in the findings provide more the of to from the of the and the that these on some of the that future In their in Supply Chain Management and the issues that be by future research. is that be an part of supply are than a or area of research. They also the issues of across the three of the and the between being versus being less in supply and by future research based on these and consider the of the purchasing and supply management literature and use the evolution of research in this area as a in for future supply management research. The authors on several theoretical perspectives that researchers supply management and its contribution to and also provide several for the methodological rigor surrounding supply management research. Finally, given the of this 50th anniversary issue of we included a research by and Supply Chain which was to be published in a issue of supply chain management scholars and with the of understanding of as well as their perspectives about future supply chain management research. They do a common understanding concerning the and of supply chain management, as well as common concerning future supply chain management research We believe that it is important for JSCM to its in supply management, and the Journal will continue to publish and submission of work that on and supply management. At the same JSCM will a journal that publishes articles relevant to all of supply chain its in and supply management, to and management of the supply through broader of the supply chain and We are to see a large increase in articles since 2008 that have employed a conceptual theory building We believe a step in the of the supply chain management discipline is the development of theory that is to our discipline. The Journal the need for theory development in the conceptual theory building discussion forum in (Volume Issue 2). Our is that the provided in that forum will and scholars in interesting and relevant theories of the supply chain and supply chain management. We are certainly not that we theories that we have employed from other but consider to assess the of in in terms of when theories may not to supply chain management (for example, see and of and to our based on a theory of the supply chain and theories of to manage supply as we the in existing JSCM will also continue to be to a wide variety of methodologically rigorous empirical the most used research are a by which to data to test or even we believe that survey research will increasingly be conducted with a number of within and outside of these as compared to a of a large number of We certainly an increased use of secondary data in supply chain management research, given the rapidly of business to While the use of a case design between the 1965–99 and 2008–13 time period, our is that case and other qualitative as continue to be used to enhance our understanding of supply chain management phenomena. we to address the issue of manuscript issue that to be increasingly by published in JSCM not only be methodologically but also or test existing theoretical and and enhance researchers are and in quite at the first our in contribution will be on the a contribution with an interesting and use theory to and prior to data the case of or to the development for example, and the case of made by authors, which to be increasingly recognized by is the to theory to data that have been It is important to that all journals have limited This that which receive a larger proportion of can only publish the best of these papers. As an one of the JSCM was recently with a in the had a manuscript under second review at one of the premier but was about the be accepted for asked about methodological or other issues that the reviewers have response was that the was in all was simply the the interest of the given the to publish in that journal. Similarly, a that provides a contribution for JSCM our understanding of a including future research and papers not only be methodologically but also theoretically and The of being theoretically or in other theory, is not an the of theory is to and a and to provide to the current assumed their they that the mission of the Journal of Supply Chain Management is to be the Journal of choice among supply chain management scholars across by research focusing on theory building and empirical We believe that JSCM has made excellent strides toward to the work of the Journal's authors, and and to the of our submitted by leading authors from other disciplines have played an important role in the understanding of the supply chain management discipline, engaging scholars from other and the theoretical understanding of supply chain management. The level of rigor has increased as by the types of research design, methodology, analysis, and theories employed in articles published in the Journal. The Journal has gained global and has increased its status as by its increased level of submissions, and recent articles that have received the Emerald Citations of Excellence We look to the from our authors, department and business school as the Journal on its