About Journal of the Operations Research Society of China

Journal of the Operations Research Society of China

The Journal of the Operations Research Society of China (JORSC) is the flagship journal of the Operations Research Society of China, published quarterly by Springer since 2013. It is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering all aspects of operations research — the mathematical science of optimisation, decision-making and resource allocation. Its print ISSN is 2194-668X and its electronic ISSN is 2194-6698. The journal is published by Springer on behalf of the society, with the editor-in-chief named in reference works as Ya-xiang Yuan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is abstracted and indexed in Scopus and Zentralblatt Math, and publishes invited reviews, regular papers, short communications and book reviews across four issues per volume.

Founding in 2013

The journal began publication in 2013, with its first volume appearing that year. Its first issue opened with work characteristic of the field's mathematical core — an article on approximation algorithms for discrete polynomial optimisation, by Simai He, Zhening Li and Shuzhong Zhang, published in volume 1, issue 1 (March 2013, pages 3–36). The founding filled a specific gap: the Operations Research Society of China, the national professional body for the discipline, had Chinese-language publication channels, but its flagship English-language journal — owned by the society and carried internationally by Springer — dates only from 2013. The title was registered in Springer's journal programme under the 40305 journal number visible in its DOIs (10.1007/s40305-...), and Scopus coverage runs continuously from 2013 to the present, an unbroken record from its first volume.

The society and the discipline in China

Operations research — known in Britain as operational research — applies mathematical modelling, optimisation and statistics to decisions in logistics, manufacturing, transportation, finance, energy and public services. China's operations research community is large and mathematically distinguished, anchored in the Chinese Academy of Sciences' institutes of mathematics and systems science and in university departments nationwide. The Operations Research Society of China is that community's national society, and this journal is its flagship. Its editorship reflects the community's standing: Ya-xiang Yuan, the editor-in-chief recorded in reference listings, is a leading numerical-optimisation mathematician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A society flagship edited from the Academy and published by Springer gives the discipline in China the same publishing architecture as its counterparts in Europe and North America.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal promotes research and applications in all aspects of operational research. In Scopus classification it sits in Mathematics (miscellaneous), Applied Mathematics, and Management Science and Operations Research — the three-way identity of a field that is simultaneously pure mathematics, applied mathematics and a management discipline. Its contents span the discipline's standard territory: continuous and discrete optimisation, approximation algorithms, scheduling, queueing, inventory and supply-chain models, game theory, stochastic modelling, network optimisation and the computational methods that solve large decision problems. Directory summaries describe its focus as advancing operations research through innovative methodologies, applications and theoretical explorations. The journal's own article mix — invited reviews to map a sub-field, regular research papers, short communications for concise results, and book reviews — matches that breadth.

Article types

Four article types define the journal. Invited reviews, commissioned from established figures, survey areas of operations research for the community. Regular papers carry the journal's main research load. Short communications allow rapid publication of compact results — a useful format in a field where a single improved algorithm or bound can be a complete contribution. Book reviews connect readers to the discipline's monograph literature. Four issues appear per volume on a quarterly cycle, published through Springer's Heidelberg programme; publisher addresses for the journal are recorded at Tiergartenstrasse 17, Heidelberg, the Springer headquarters address that appears on many of its mathematics titles. The journal is not an open-access title by default; it operates on Springer's subscription model with the publisher's standard author options.

Indexing and metrics

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Scopus — with coverage from 2013 continuously — and in Zentralblatt Math, the mathematics reviewing service, a pairing appropriate to its mathematical character. SCImago records an h-index of 23 in an earlier compilation and quartile placements of Q2 in Mathematics (miscellaneous) and Q3 in Applied Mathematics and in Management Science and Operations Research in one ranking vintage, with more recent compilations showing Q2 in Applied Mathematics and Mathematics (miscellaneous) and a Scopus CiteScore of 3.3. A Journal Citation Reports-based impact factor of 1.0 is reported in current metrics listings. One SCImago-derived count records 493 total documents across its run to 2024. For a mathematics journal, where citation counts are structurally lower than in the life sciences, these figures describe a respectable mid-tier international title.

Editorial leadership and authors

Reference works record the editor-in-chief as Ya-xiang Yuan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Yuan's field is nonlinear optimisation — trust-region methods and quasi-Newton methods among them — and his leadership anchors the journal in the Academy's Institute of Computational Mathematics and Scientific/Engineering Computing tradition. The journal's first-issue authors set the pattern for its authorship: leading Chinese optimisation scholars, including figures based in Hong Kong and at international universities, publishing alongside the mainland community. The Operations Research Society of China's membership supplies both its editorial board and the core of its authorship, while Springer's platform brings international submissions — the typical two-way traffic of a society flagship in a global mathematical discipline.

Position among operations research journals

Operations research is served internationally by long-established titles from INFORMS, from the European and British societies, and by Springer's own Annals of Operations Research. The Journal of the Operations Research Society of China is the Chinese society's entry in that company — younger than its Western counterparts, as its 2013 founding shows, but structurally equivalent: society-owned, Springer-published, Scopus- and Zentralblatt-indexed, quarterly, and edited by a leading figure of the national discipline. Within this directory's China collection it pairs with the Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering as the record of how China's mathematical decision sciences present themselves internationally — one through the systems-engineering society founded in the Qian Xuesen tradition, the other through the operations research society's optimisation community.

Readership and role

The journal's readers are operations researchers, applied mathematicians, management scientists and the engineers and analysts who use optimisation in industry and government. For Chinese authors it provides a society flagship in English, avoiding the need to send all significant work to foreign journals; for international readers it documents the strength of Chinese optimisation research — a field in which Chinese groups contribute heavily to algorithms, complexity results and applications from logistics to energy systems. Book reviews and invited reviews make it usable as a keeping-up journal for the discipline, not only as an archive of new results. Its citation abbreviation is J Oper Res Soc China.

Practical information

The Journal of the Operations Research Society of China is published quarterly by Springer on behalf of the Operations Research Society of China, and has appeared since 2013. Print ISSN: 2194-668X. Electronic ISSN: 2194-6698. It is indexed in Scopus and Zentralblatt Math. The journal publishes invited reviews, regular papers, short communications and book reviews in all areas of operations research. Its Springer journal page carries current editorial board information, submission instructions and the full archive from volume 1 (2013). The editor-in-chief recorded in reference listings is Ya-xiang Yuan (Chinese Academy of Sciences). Prospective authors should follow the journal's Springer submission guidelines for manuscript preparation and its policies on the subscription and open-access options available on acceptance.