WFU Babcock Graduate School of Management professor, Jack Meredith, recognized for published works

A Wake Forest University Babcock Graduate School of Management professor has been recognized by a leading business journal for his work in the publication.

A study by the editors of The Journal of Operations Management shows that Jack Meredith is the publication’s second most prolific author. Meredith, a past editor of the journal, has been published 13 times. He is professor of Management and Broyhill Distinguished Scholar and Chair in Operations at the school.

Meredith has written eight books on operations management, project management and management science, including “Project Management: A Managerial Approach” and “Operations Management for MBAs.” Meredith is only one of two authors – from 1,071 contributors — who have been published more than 13 times. Approximately 85% of the people who have published in the JOM have done so only one or two times. Babcock professors Tim Smunt, Brooke Saladin, and Scott Shafer have also been published multiple times in the JOM. Smunt has been published 5 times putting him in the 96.5 percentile and Saladin and Shafer have been published 3 times putting them in the 90.7 percentile.

“The record of the group is impressive,” said Charles Iacovou, senior associate dean of the Babcock School, associate professor of Management. “Congratulations to all of you for that accomplishment.”

“As nice as this recognition is, I am more proud of three other events involving the Journal of Operations Management,” Meredith said. “The first was being able to help raise the status of the JOM while I was its editor-in-chief here at Wake Forest University to the Financial Times list of one of the top 36 journals in the world in the field of business, and the Academy of Management’s recognition of JOM as the top journal in the discipline of Operations Management.

“The second aspect I am proud of was being able to work with a Calloway professor, Umit Akinc, to solve an industrial problem and publish it in JOM in 2007 that I had run up against almost 20 years previously.”

Meredith said a team of researchers he was working with in Cincinnati in 1988 identified a new industrial problem that seemed to have no solution. In 1990, the team published in JOM a description of the problem and how firms coped, the hope being that other academic researchers would tackle and solve it.

“With no solution in sight, we decided in 1994 to further publicize and explain the dilemma and coping strategies in Sloan Management Review for other managers that might also be facing this problem. But no one seemed able to solve our managerial dilemma, until Umit formulated the problem mathematically and then solved it with simulation analysis.”

Meredith said he also is proud to continue to contribute to leading edge research with an article in a coming issue of JOM that details the history of research in the Operations Management discipline called “The Evolution of the Intellectual Structure of Operations Management—1980-2006: A Citation/Co-Citation Analysis.” Meredith co-authored the piece with Alan Pilkington, a professor in the United Kingdom.

The Journal of Operations Management is repeatedly ranked above other journals in the discipline and continues to be viewed as a pre-eminent marker of scholarship outside the field, according to its web site. It is the only OM-focused empirical journal used by both the Financial Times in its rankings of business schools as well as by the University of Texas in its most recent 2006 assessment of scholarship.

Said Shafer, “The Journal of Operations Management is considered by many to be the top journal in the field of operations management. Being the second most prolific author of articles in this journal is a tremendous achievement. To put this in perspective, over 85 percent of the people who have published in the Journal of Operations Management have done so only one or two times. Jack has published in the journal 13 times.”