The Ombudsman : Academic Research in MS / OR : Science or Trivial Pursuit ?

The Ombudsman column was created with the belief that academic journals ignore many important problems. Halse and Lilien, in the following paper, approach this issue by hoking at the reward systems in universities: do they encourage or discourage competent work on important problems? It is easy to do trivial work on important problems . . . but it is difficult to publish it. Far more profitable for the aspiring academic is to do rigorous work on trivial problems. This is easy to do and easy to publish. But how can universities encourage competent work on important problems? That is not easy to do nor to publish. I hope that the Halse and Lilien paper will encourage further research on the topic. The Ombudsman column will provide space for contributions on ways to improve academic research. Questions such as "Do people with tenure feel free to publish their ideas and findings?" and "Does a goal to produce x publications per year in prestigious journals improve the quality of the research at a university?" are worth investigating. I . Scott Armstrong