Periodical Usefulness: The U.S. Logistics Educator Perspective

Abstract

Logistics professionals face a challenge today -how to best allocate precious budgetary resources and reading time to a growing array of logistics-related publications. Time-challenged members of the logistics community would benefit from the knowledge of what publications are widely used and found to be of value. This article generates insight into these issues and provides guidance for individuals in search of valuable information tools.Unlike traditional studies of this nature, which base evaluations on the academic prestige or the research impact of periodicals (e.g., Heischmidt and Gordon 1993;Howard and Nikolai 1983), this study focuses on functional usefulness. Certainly, educators will have a direct interest in their peers' ratings of the periodicals in terms of research, outreach, and teaching merits. Additionally, logistics managers can use the rating results to help identify appropriate information resources for analogous industry activities (e.g., employee training and personal professional development).The analysis of periodical usefulness is presented in four major sections. The first two sections lay the foundation for the study, discussing the ideal structure of a periodical ranking study and how the current study was designed to attain an accurate assessment of logistics periodical usefulness from the target population. The third section reveals results of the study, including periodical ratings, group comparisons, a bias analysis, and usefulness index scores. The final section presents insights gleaned from the study, its potential uses by key constituents, and its caveats. BACKGROUNDThe evaluation of periodicals is neither a trivial topic nor one of exclusive interest to educators. Studies providing a benchmark of specialty periodicals can be used for a variety of purposes, in addition to those described above. The evaluation results can be used by practitioners to become more aware of valuable resources and information outlets (Fawcett, Vellenga, and Truitt 1995), university administrators to assess faculty research performance (Hull and Wright 1990), and periodical publishers to keep their editorial objectives and content in sync with reader needs (Zivney and Reichenstein 1994).

Supply chain management: A multidisciplinary content analysis of vertical relations between companies, 1997–2006

“…Its main drawback is, however, its subjectivity. This second method was used here to examine the index ratings of the main journals on marketing (Hult et al, 1997), logistics (Gibson & Hanna, 2003) and marketing channels (Runyan, 2008), as well as those studies that analyze the multidisciplinary publication preferences of researchers working on SCM (Ferguson, 1983;Fawcett et al, 1995;Kumar & Kwon, 2004;Zsidisin et al, 2007). Appendix I offers a table with the journals proposed by these last authors.…”

Logistics and Supply Chain Management Applications Within a Global Context: An Overview

“…While JBL occupies rank 7 in our frequency table above, better rankings are achieved when considering the impact and the relative count. For example, when comparing the five most useful journals for U.S. logistics educators, as determined by Gibson and Hanna (2005), against Table 1, JBL received rank one. In addition, we compared our count of global L&SCM articles in each journal to the total number of papers published since 2000 in the respective outlet.…”

How risk and uncertainty is used in supply chain management: a literature study

“…The literature study performed is based on a list of relevant journals identified as a compromise between other literature studies performed within the field (Zsidisin, 2003) and evaluations of the usefulness of journals (Gibson & Hanna, 2003). The journals investigated fall in three categories, listed in Table 1 below.…”