POLICY

The editorial board will actively identify and pursue opportunities for new surveys. Thus, the board will invite world-class researchers to share the latest developments in their area of expertise with the OR/MS community. In addition, the editorial board welcomes ideas from the community. Authors who intend to contribute a survey are invited to contact one of the three editors at an early stage of their efforts: Please send a 1-2 page document containing motivation, abstract and tentative table of contents.

Jan Karel Lenstra
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI)
Kruislaan 413
1098 SJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Email: jan.karel.lenstra@cwi.nl

Michael Trick
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
USA
Email: trick@cmu.edu

Bert Zwart
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI)
Kruislaan 413
1098 SJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Email: bert.zwart@cwi.nl

What makes a good survey?

The following is a list of characteristics we feel that an ideal SORMS submission should satisfy.

1. Choice of topic.
A survey topic can be both on theory and applications of OR/MS and can be of several types. For example, a survey can focus on

• Results that are considered standards by experts in the community but which not have been documented in textbooks.
• Standard results which have been, in some way, streamlined; for example new proof techniques leading to more elegant derivations of known results.
• New developments in methodology or new application areas (hot topics).

Accepted SORMS submissions should be of significant interest to the OR/MS community. The associated literature should be of sufficient significance and, from an OR perspective, originality to warrant a survey in our journal. In particular, a topic should be sufficiently broad. Surveys focusing on the work of a single author or single group of authors may be possible, but will be considered with extra care.

2. Choice of audience and writing.
The readership of SORMS will be broad, ranging from graduate students to senior researchers, and from OR/MS professionals to applied mathematicians. An ideal SORMS survey should be appealing to a wide enough subset of this audience.

A survey paper is not written in the same way as a research paper. Technical details that are not crucial should be addressed on a sufficiently high level, readers interested in these can be referred to particular papers. Examples of good survey papers can be found in the existing Handbook series.
Other relevant guidelines are:

• A good survey does not only focus on the work of the author but provides an appropriate broader context.
• It takes more effort to write a short survey than a long survey.
• A good survey should have intrinsic added value, in the sense that the sum should be stronger than its parts. For example, it may provide new structure, point out connections not noticed before, or a new context for old results.
• It helps if a survey is written by an expert that masters the subject enough to provide newcomers a well guided tour through a new area.