ITE Special Issue: Cases Based on Real-World Projects from the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics

Posted by: Jeroen Belien
Date:2020-04-22
Contact:[email protected]

INFORMS is the prominent organization of Analytics professionals and academics, and publisher of multiple highly rated Journals. INFORMS Transactions on Education is the INFORMS journal focused on advancing and disseminating approaches, cases and research that lead to instructional success. ITE’s mission is to become the flagship journal of education science related to the core domains of INFORMS: Management Science (MS), Operations Research (OR), Operations Management (OM) and analytics. 

Case-based learning is essential to transitioning analytics from textbooks to the real-world. Though “real-world”, often, cases are fictitious, however, perhaps leaving students with the sense that they are still toy problems and not truly ‘real’. There are a host of real-world applications in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (IJAA; formerly Interfaces) which demonstrate actual application, but beyond broad conceptualization, are often difficult for students and practitioners to grasp in detail. 

There is a real opportunity to improve on both of these initiatives by creating cases that are based directly on IJAA articles.  ITE case users can point directly to the real-world application of using exactly these methods to garner real-world benefits by assigning IJAA readings prior to or subsequent to case assignment.  IJAA readers can get practice data sets to convert conceptual understanding to hands-on capabilities.  Researchers might use case data sets to explore other solution approaches than that presented in IJAA.

Example topics for potential submissions include, but are not limited to: 

  • A survey of existing examples of joint IJAA and Interfaces papers and ITE cases that are already in existence, pointing out similarities and differences of the IJAA and ITE approaches.
  • Best practices in converting real-world problems into cases, including level of transparency of actual data, company names, and the like.
  • Actual cases that mirror IJAA/Int projects, which could be either from the original IJAA author, or another if sufficient similarities and familiarity exists.
  • Best practices in using an IJAA/int paper as study material in an OR/MS/Analytics course as a lecture, hands-on exercise, individual or group assignment, etc.   
  • Etc. 

Authors should review the INFORMS Transactions on Education instructions on preparing a paper at: https://pubsonline.informs.org/page/ited/submission-guidelines

Papers must be submitted online at:

https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ite 

The timeline is as follows:

  • 31 October, 2020: Target deadline for first round of submissions
  • 31 January 2021: First round of reviews completed, Decisions (and requests for revision, if appropriate) delivered to authors
  • July, 2021: Second round of reviews delivered to authors:
  • November, 2021: Final versions of accepted papers to be submitted
  • March, 2022: Target ITE publication date

Publication contacts information for the Special Issue Editors:

Michael F. Gorman

University of Dayton

[email protected]

Jeroen Belien

KU Leuven

[email protected]