This short paper aims to investigate some of the historical developments of
one classic, well-cited and highly esteemed scientific journal in the domain of
quantitative operations research - namely the INFORMS journal Operations
Research - over a period of 25 years between 1981 and 2006. As such this paper,
and the journal in question, represents one representative attempt to analyze -
for the purpose of possible future generalization - how research production has
evolved, and evolves, over time. Among the general developments that we think
we can trace are that (a) the historical overviews (i.e., literature surveys)
in the articles, as well as the list of references, somewhat
counter-intuitively shrink over time, while (b) the motivating and modelling
parts grow. We also attempt to characterize - in some detail - the appearance
and character, over time, of the most cited, as well as the least cited, papers
over the years studied. In particular, we find that many of the least cited
papers are quite imbalanced. For example, some of them include one main section
only, and the least cited papers also have shorter reference lists.
We also analyse the articles' utilization of important buzz words
representing the constitutive parts of an OR journal paper, based on Subben's
checklist (Larsson and Patriksson, 2014, 2016). Based on a word count of these
buzz words we conclude through a citation study, utilizing a collection of
particularly highly or little cited papers, that there is a quite strong
positive correlation between a journal paper being highly cited and its degree
of utilization of this checklist
