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Is there any compact resource that includes a list of all academic journals in the OR/MS space, ranked by journal importance? Although there are some helpful features offered by publisher websites such as Elsevier journal finder, I think it would be helpful if such a list were to be added here as well.

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    $\begingroup$ is there a possibility to turn this thread into a public wiki and we make it such a list? $\endgroup$
    – Marco Lübbecke
    Jun 25, 2019 at 8:08
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    $\begingroup$ First of all, you have to decide what even constitutes an OR Journal? For instance, is "Mathematical Programming" (various series) link.springer.com/journal/10107 an "O.R." .journal. What about other optimization journals, some of which focus on engineering, not O.R. applications? What about applied probability journals? What about ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), for which stochastic simulation and modeling applicable to O.R. is within scope, but the scope extends outside O.R/ as well? There are plenty of other boundaries needing adjudication. $\endgroup$
    – Mark L. Stone
    Jun 25, 2019 at 8:51
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    $\begingroup$ @MarcoLübbecke You are free to create a community wiki answer and encourage others to expand it. However, forcing a thread or any other posts to become CW is not recommended, see this answer on or.meta. $\endgroup$
    – Discrete lizard
    Jun 26, 2019 at 3:49
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    $\begingroup$ thanks for this (my suggestions wasn't meant as "forcing", apologies if it appeared that way) $\endgroup$
    – Marco Lübbecke
    Jun 26, 2019 at 7:50

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Here are a few sources. In my opinion, all are to be taken with a grain of salt.

Scimago Journal and Country Rank

The Scimago Journal and Country Rank (the link goes to the Management Science and Operations Research category) ranks journals according to SJR's proprietary index. The first 7 are:

enter image description here

To me, the rankings seem reasonable, if not totally reliable.

Journal Citation Report

When I came up for tenure about 10 years ago, my university used the Journal Citation Report, which at the time was owned by ISI Web of Science, but now appears to be on a separate site (but linked to from WoS). It's behind a paywall, so I can't link to the exact portion of the site (and I am finding the site quite clunky and un-user-friendly), but here is a screenshot of the first few journals listed under the Operations Research and Management Science category, ranked by Impact Factor:

enter image description here

The journals listed here are perfectly good, but I think most of us would agree that these are not the "top" 7 OR journals. (For example, Operations Research, Management Science, Math Programming, etc. are ranked 26, 9, and 14, respectively.) But we all also know that Impact Factor is not a terribly reliable measure of quality.

There is also a carefully designed, although now out of date, article in Interfaces in 2005, that presents rankings of OM journals, compiled from surveys by business school professors. Here are the top 10:

enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ Great answer Larry. Measuring the impact of the work published in various journals will always be both important and imperfect. It is too bad, though, that some schools and departments create artificial incentives/requirements to publish in certain journals. I cannot see how this helps our field, but I do understand why academic leaders believe it will help their specific units. $\endgroup$
    – alerera
    Jun 25, 2019 at 12:33
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Personally, I think you shouldn't be merely motivated by quantitative journal rankings as they often rely on measures that could be manipulated. In particular, the impact factor of a journal would increase if the editor required authors to cite a large number of recent publications of that journal. Although the organizations responsible for calculating these measures try to fight these tactics, there are occasional slip-ups.

Instead, I suggest that consult your senior colleagues or respected scholars in your field about this issue as top journals in OR or your field do not necessarily have the highest impact factors (a prominent example is Operations Research published by INFORMS). Ask them which journals are worth the attention or might impress the hiring committees better. This is important especially if you're working on OR-related areas such as operations management.

Finally, to complete Larry's answer, there is the "Academic Journal Guide" published by Chartered Association of Business Schools, available from here. It combines quantitative measures with the opinions of experts in different fields to create a ranking list. Hence, while there is a correlation with impacts factors offered by Web of Science, the final order is not necessarily the same and offer some insights about the prestige of the journals. For example, the first OR journal in this ranking is the "Management Science" with an impact factor of about three, while the fourth journal is the "IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation" with an impact factor of about eight. I think this ranking could help you better than mere impact factors.

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Sharing the same reservations on journal rankings I can add some more which are particular relevant for hiring decisions in Germany and Europe.

The German association of business administration professors maintains the following journal rankings for different categories:

OR: https://vhbonline.org/vhb4you/jourqual/vhb-jourqual-3/teilrating-or/

OM: https://vhbonline.org/vhb4you/jourqual/vhb-jourqual-3/teilrating-prod/

Business Administration: https://vhbonline.org/vhb4you/jourqual/vhb-jourqual-3/teilrating-abwl/

Logistics: https://vhbonline.org/vhb4you/jourqual/vhb-jourqual-3/teilrating-log/

For European business schools hiring the ERIM and FT50 lists are very important:

https://www.erim.eur.nl/about-erim/erim-journals-list-ejl/

https://research.library.gsu.edu/c.php?g=388883&p=2638798

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Another source providing this information is google scholar. Here is the ranking for mathematical optimization journals. Also as @Chang pointed out here is the ranking for operations research journals.

As per one's subject of interest; after a little search, one can get the ranking for other areas as well e.g. game theory and decision sciences could be found under Business, Economics and Management here

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    $\begingroup$ Here is the ranking for OR journals from Google Scholar. scholar.google.com/… $\endgroup$
    – Chang
    Jun 26, 2019 at 17:12
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There is a very new OR journal with a very broad scope:

In addition to the journals listed in the other answers, there are some military-themed journals:

These may to be good outlets for national security, defense, or other military application-themed articles.

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    $\begingroup$ This is useful, but the question was about finding rankings of journals, not just individual journals. Do you know if there is a ranking of these military OR journals? $\endgroup$
    – LarrySnyder610
    Jun 25, 2019 at 13:57
  • $\begingroup$ I can post the metrics if that would help. Otherwise I can delete the answer. I meant to include metrics but must have been distracted. Thanks for pointing this out. $\endgroup$
    – SecretAgentMan
    Jun 25, 2019 at 15:40
  • $\begingroup$ I don't know, it's really up to the OP; maybe post a comment on the question itself? $\endgroup$
    – LarrySnyder610
    Jun 25, 2019 at 16:40

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