Editorial: The Third Interfaces Ranking of Universities' Contributions to the Practice Literature

Research universities expend a lot of effort trying to measure contributions to the research literature. In an applied field like OR/MS, contributions to the practice literature are also important, but five years ago, there was no scheme for measuring such contributions. On the theory that we tend to get what we measure and reward, I started a simple scheme to measure universities' contributions to the INFORMS practice literature. I described the scheme, the rationale for it, and the results of applying it to the 1988-to-1994 literature to rank universities in an Interfaces editorial [Rothkopf, Michael H. 1996, “Editorial: Which universities contribute to the practice literature? The first Interfaces ranking,” Interfaces , Vol. 26, No. 2 (March–April), pp. 16–21]. I promised to update the rankings periodically, and a subsequent editorial carried an updated set of rankings based upon the 1990-to-1996 literature [Rothkopf, Michael H. 1997, “Editorial: Which universities contribute to the practice literature? The second Interfaces ranking,” Interfaces , Vol. 27, No. 4 (July–August), pp. 19–22]. This editorial contains the latest rankings based upon the 1992-to-1998 literature. The new rankings have a new top university, the University of Texas at Austin, and they confirm some trends that the comparison of the first and second rankings suggested.