Meta Research in Or/Ms: A Taxonomy, Bibliography and Classification of the Literature

Abstract

This paper develops a taxonomy of objectives and methods used to do research on research or meta-research (MR) in operations research and the management sciences (OR/MS). Using this taxonomy, most MR type papers published in refereed OR/MS journals are identified and classified. The resulting (compact) classifications are tabulated and for each paper so tabulated, the respective authors? key-words (KW) or the journals? subject categories (SC) if available, are shown. The classifications are analyzed to show subsets of the total OR/MS universe of knowledge that have already been taxonomically addressed. More importantly the analysis identifies/specifies areas of OR/MS for future MR. Lastly, It is shown that the taxonomy offers much more discriminating capability then do KWs or SCs. This observation has major ramifications regarding the relative efficacy of key-words versus this approach for both bibliometric and epistemological analysis.

Keywords: OR/MS, operations research, management science, meta research, taxonomy, classification, key words, subject categories