Our field, and many others, seeks to embrace diversity in many forms. We believe that as more, and more varied voices, especially those of traditionally-underrepresented groups, contribute to scholarly inquiry and research-informed practice, the stronger, more vibrant and higher-impact will our discipline become. Therefore, we summarize the demographic characteristics of lead authors in this Special Issue.
By gender, our lead authors are more diverse than the operations research/management science/decision science/systems science fields as a whole: 56% of lead authors are male, while 46% are female.
There is less diversity by race and ethnicity, however. We estimate that 71% of all lead authors are white/Caucasian, while 19% are black/African/African descent, while 6% are Hispanic/Latino and 3% are Asian.
Considering the country of current residence for lead authors, we observe dominance by developed countries: 68% of lead authors reside in Europe, 16% reside in North America, 10% reside in Australasia, and 3% apiece reside in Africa and South America.