More on case study papers
- PDF / 125,574 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595 x 842 pts (A4) Page_size
- 0 Downloads / 225 Views
#1999 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/99 $12.00 http://www.stockton-press.co.uk/jor
Viewpoint ± More on case study papers Following the Viewpoints on `what is a practice paper' in the November 1997 issue of JORS,1 ± 3 there are clearly some differences of opinion. My view is that a practice paper is a study of a real, practical problem, where a client wants to know the answer for the sake of the answer (not how it was arrived at)Ða piece of real OR workÐbut undertaken in an academic and rigorous way providing insights and generalised theory that other practitioners may ®nd useful. I wrote a letter in the FOR (the Fellowship) Newsletter a couple of years ago pointing out that, rather than academic research simply feeding into practice, in fact historically and currently much of the best research has come about from the reverse process: `research' in the classic sense of real studies giving rise to the sort of practice papers I have just de®ned. In these studies, often the generalised theory and insights come serendipitously, that is, you did not set out to discover something general, but it arose from the study you did. As one illustration, I quoted the work done here under Colin Eden at Strathclyde University on the Channel Tunnel Le Shuttle rolling-stock,4 a piece of professional consultancy that also provided a lot of research output, concerning aspects such as the nature of large projects and how to model them, hard and soft methods and their synergy, learning curves, the use of cognitive mapping as a knowledge repository inter al. I suppose this might be seen as a type of action research, a research methodology described by Eden and Huxham,5 who give a list of around 20 features on what constitutes action research. We can also de®ne what is not a practice paper. As an Associate Editor, I know that sinking feeling when I see yet another paper which has been motivated by the desire to solve a ®ctitious problem (yet another modi®cation to the EOQ? Solving a mythical machine set-up problem? . . .). Even using `real' data-sets to test out a method is only half a practice-paper, as we all know that the actual algorithmic solution to a numerical problem is usually only a minor part of an OR studyÐmaking sense of the `mess', formulating the problem, working with the client, deciding on an approach, choosing a technique, all of these are lost when you simply test out the `sums'. (Having said that, as an aside, these are part of every true OR study, and I really do not see why there should be a special Associate EditorÐ dividing off the `process of OR' from `the rest of OR' is like dividing off `medicine' from anything to do with patients.) Equally though, an OR application which has nothing to teach other practitioners (`I used this spreadsheet and saved the company £x million') might be suitable for Interfaces or
OR Insight but not for JORSÐwe must be able to learn something useful from reading the paper. Why don't practitioners publish? I do not knowÐI was a practitioner for nine year
Data Loading...
