About Journal of Management Analytics

Journal of Management Analytics

The Journal of Management Analytics, usually abbreviated JMA, is an international peer-reviewed journal devoted to the theory of data analytics and its applications across the traditional business disciplines. It is published by Taylor & Francis, through its Routledge journals programme, in association with the Antai College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, and it was launched in 2014. Its founding premise was that analytics — the disciplined use of data, models and computation to support decisions — was becoming a field in its own right within management research, cutting across accounting, finance, marketing, operations and organisational management, and that it deserved a journal organised around the method and its business applications rather than around any single functional area.

The journal's identifiers are print ISSN 2327-0012 and electronic ISSN 2327-0039. It publishes in English only, accepts original research articles, and is a hybrid open-access journal: authors may publish behind the subscription route at no article charge, or choose open access under Taylor & Francis's Open Select programme. The directory listing records it as indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University's journal centre adds that in 2021 the journal was indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, an unusually rapid rise for a journal then only seven years old.

Origins and launch in 2014

The Journal of Management Analytics began publication in 2014, at the moment when "big data" had moved from a technical slogan to a boardroom concern and business schools worldwide were building analytics programmes. A journal launched from Shanghai at that moment was well placed: Chinese firms and Chinese universities were investing heavily in data-driven management, e-commerce and platform businesses were generating research data at unprecedented scale, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University was building its business school, Antai College, into an international research institution.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University describes JMA as an academic journal with full independent copyright owned by the university, which has supported it strongly since its inception, and credits that support with professional, high-quality development in journal operation and brand building. In 2021 the journal was selected for China's Excellence Action Plan for New High-Starting Point Journals, part of a national programme, launched in 2019 by seven Chinese bodies including the China Association for Science and Technology and the ministries of finance, education and science and technology, to build world-class scientific journals from China. In 2022 it was included in the FMS list of recommended high-quality journals in management science, and in the 2023 Chinese Academy of Sciences journal ranking it entered the second tier in the broad management science category.

The Antai College and Shanghai base

The journal's academic home is the Antai College of Economics and Management, the business school of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, whose main campus sits in Shanghai's Xuhui district. That anchoring is visible in the journal's leadership: its editors-in-chief and executive editor-in-chief include senior Antai faculty, and associate editors from the university serve alongside an international board. At the same time the journal is not a house magazine for one school. Its editorial structures deliberately pair Shanghai-based editors with scholars in North America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere in Asia, reflecting the co-editorship model described below.

Shanghai itself is part of the journal's identity. The city is China's commercial and financial capital, home to the head offices and data operations of firms across retail, logistics, manufacturing and finance, and its universities draw management researchers working on exactly the problems the journal covers: platform markets, supply chains, financial technology, digital marketing and data-driven operations. A management analytics journal edited from Shanghai sits close to both the data and the decision-makers its research is meant to serve.

Aims and scope

Taylor & Francis states the journal's focus plainly: it is concerned with the theory of data analytics and its applications in traditional business disciplines, and the interface between data analytics and those disciplines is of particular interest. The disciplines named are accounting, finance, management, marketing, production and operations management, and supply chain management. The emphasis on the interface is the journal's defining editorial choice. A purely methodological paper with no business application, or a purely descriptive business paper with no analytical substance, fits less well than work that brings the two together — a new model tested on a real management problem, or a management question that forces a methodological advance.

The research methods integral to the journal, as listed by the publisher, include empirical research, data analytics, big data analytics, data science, operations research, management science, decision science and simulation modelling. That list spans the quantitative traditions of the business school, from econometric empirics to optimisation and simulation, and signals that the journal judges papers by the quality of their analytical contribution rather than by allegiance to one method.

Analytics in finance, accounting and marketing

Within finance and accounting, analytics research of the kind the journal publishes addresses problems such as data-driven risk assessment, fraud and anomaly detection, forecasting from large and unstructured datasets, and the use of text and alternative data in financial decision-making. These are areas where the volume and velocity of available data have outrun traditional techniques, and where a journal organised around analytics can publish methodological work that a general finance journal might treat as peripheral.

In marketing, the corresponding agenda includes customer analytics, demand forecasting, pricing and recommendation, and the measurement of digital marketing effects — fields transformed by platform data from e-commerce and social media, in which Chinese firms and Chinese datasets have been especially prominent. In general management, analytics papers examine how data and algorithmic decision support change organisational decisions, performance measurement and strategy. The journal's scope statement treats these not as separate silos but as applications of a shared analytical toolkit, and papers that transfer a method from one functional area to another are squarely within its remit.

Operations, production and supply chain analytics

Production and operations management and supply chain management form the other great pillar of the journal's scope, reflecting the operations research heritage of management science and the strengths of its editorial team. Research in this part of the journal models and optimises processes such as inventory management, demand forecasting, scheduling, logistics and supply chain design, frequently under uncertainty and fluctuating market conditions. Decision science and multi-criteria decision-making, in which decision-makers must weigh competing objectives rather than optimise a single measure, are recurring methodological themes.

This operations strand also connects the journal to practice in the Chinese economy, where manufacturing scale, e-commerce logistics and complex multi-tier supply chains generate both the problems and the data for analytics research. Simulation modelling, listed among the journal's core methods, is particularly at home here, where systems are too complex or too costly to experiment on directly.

Editorial leadership

The journal's editors-in-chief, as listed by Taylor & Francis, are Yuan Li of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Lida Xu of Old Dominion University in the United States, with Guohua Wan of Shanghai Jiao Tong University serving as executive editor-in-chief. That structure — paired leadership between Shanghai and the United States, with an executive editor at the home institution handling the journal's operation — embodies the journal's positioning between Chinese and international research communities.

Below the editors-in-chief sits a large associate editor board drawn from universities including the University of Arizona, Boston University, the University of Pennsylvania, Copenhagen Business School, ESCP Business School, Ohio State University, Melbourne Business School and the University of Manchester, alongside many leading Chinese universities, and an editorial advisory board that includes senior figures from Tsinghua University, New York University, Temple University and Poznań University of Technology. The editorial board proper adds further members from institutions such as Purdue University and Fudan University. For authors, that breadth signals that manuscripts are handled by editors active in the relevant subfield; for readers, it is evidence of the international network the journal has built since 2014.

Peer review and publishing model

All research articles in the journal undergo rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymised refereeing by at least two anonymous referees, according to the publisher's stated policy. The journal publishes manuscripts in English only and accepts original articles. Submissions are handled through the ScholarOne Manuscripts system, Taylor & Francis's standard submission and peer-review platform.

As a hybrid open-access journal in the Open Select programme, the Journal of Management Analytics gives authors a choice. An author who chooses open access makes the article free to read immediately on publication, and may be asked to pay an article publishing charge, which can be covered or reduced where the author's institution or funder has an open-access agreement with Taylor & Francis. An author who does not choose open access pays no such charge and publishes under the subscription model. The journal appears four times a year, a quarterly rhythm consistent with a selective research title.

Indexing, recognition and standing

The directory listing records the journal as indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and in Scopus, with Scopus coverage running from its 2014 launch. Shanghai Jiao Tong University's account of the journal's progress adds the milestones that mark its standing within China and internationally: selection in 2021 for the Excellence Action Plan for new high-starting-point journals, SSCI indexing in the same year, inclusion in the FMS recommended list for management science in 2022, and a second-tier placing in the 2023 Chinese Academy of Sciences ranking for management science. The university also reports a CiteScore that placed the journal at the top of its subfield, reflecting heavy citation of its analytics articles.

Readers should treat individual impact metrics as year-specific, since they move with each Journal Citation Reports and Scopus release, but the pattern across these independent signals is consistent: a journal founded in 2014 reached the major citation indexes quickly and is treated by its home university as one of its flagship English-language titles.

Readership and who should use it

The journal's core readership is academic: researchers and doctoral students in business analytics, operations research, information systems, marketing science, financial technology and related fields, together with the business school libraries that serve them. Its papers are written for specialists, and assume fluency in quantitative method. Practising analysts and managers are a secondary audience, most likely to reach the journal through review and application-oriented articles rather than through its methodological core.

For researchers deciding where to submit, the journal is a natural candidate when the paper's contribution lies at the junction of a recognised business discipline and a serious analytical method — empirical, computational or mathematical — and when the author wants that paper read by both the disciplinary and the analytics communities. For readers mapping the field, it is one of the clearest records of how management research absorbed the data revolution of the 2010s, published from one of the cities where that revolution was happening fastest.

Place among management journals

Management publishing is crowded with disciplinary journals and with generalist titles, but journals organised around analytics as the unifying idea remain comparatively few, and fewer still are based in China while publishing with a major international house. The Journal of Management Analytics fills that space. Its combination of Shanghai Jiao Tong University ownership and copyright, Taylor & Francis publication, an international co-editorship, and indexing in the major citation databases makes it a representative example of the new generation of China-based English-language journals built to international standards from the start, rather than converted from a Chinese-language predecessor.

That, ultimately, is its significance in this directory: not simply another outlet for quantitative management papers, but evidence of how Chinese business schools entered global scholarly publishing in the analytics era — with a journal whose subject, data-driven decision-making, was itself the defining management theme of its founding decade.