Rejected from Management Science? The Best Journals to Submit Next

The right target after Management Science depends on whether the paper is an operations-research method, a focused operations-management problem, an organization-theory contribution, or a cross-functional decision result that needed a more specialist home. The INFORMS family overlaps, and a desk rejection most often means the Department Editor judged the work a better fit for a sister venue. There is no automatic transfer, so the table below is your routing map for a fresh submission.

Source: INFORMS official journal-metrics pages, Clarivate JCR 2024, and each journal's own scope statement (accessed June 2026). For a top business journal, selectivity is signaled by acceptance and desk-rejection rate, not by the impact factor.

1. Operations Research

Reach for OR when the contribution is the operations-research method or theory itself rather than a management decision the method enables. In the editors' own framing, OR is a collection of tools for examining problems scientifically, and the acceptance bar is that the work matters to more than a small subset of the OR community and stands the test of time.

If your Management Science rejection turned on a sharper algorithm or a new theoretical result with the management framing tacked on, OR is the more honest home. The bar is high: roughly 10 percent of submissions are accepted.

Best for: an OR theory or methodology advance whose contribution is the technique, not the management consequence.

2. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM)

M&SOM was built to publish operations-management frontiers that Management Science and Operations Research would not, and it puts understanding a real, complex OM problem ahead of the methodology. A focused supply-chain, service-operations, or manufacturing contribution often fits M&SOM better than the broad Operations Management department at Management Science, where the breadth bar can sink an otherwise strong OM paper. If the Department Editor's signal was that your problem was too specialized for the multidisciplinary flagship, this is the cleanest specialist step.

Best for: a problem-first operations-management paper where the OM problem, not a general management principle, is the protagonist.

3. Production and Operations Management (POM)

POM is the broad operations-management society flagship and the natural home for empirical and behavioral operations work alongside analytical models. When the Management Science rejection was about cross-department breadth rather than the quality of the operations contribution, POM gives the same paper a specialist OM audience that judges the operations result on its own terms. It carries a strong field standing without requiring the paper to argue it belongs in a cross-functional business journal.

Best for: a solid operations-management contribution, including empirical and behavioral operations, that needed an OM-specialist readership.

4. Organization Science

Choose Organization Science only when the contribution is genuinely to organization theory, not a management finding with an organizational backdrop. Management Science's Organizations department wants management consequence; Organization Science wants a theoretical contribution to how organizations actually work. If your rejection said the paper was an organizational study without enough cross-department management payoff, the same paper may read as a strong theory contribution where referees value the organizational move on its own terms.

Best for: a paper whose real contribution is to organization theory and organizational research rather than a functional-area management decision.

5. European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR)

EJOR is the broad applied operational-research and analytics venue for method-first work that still wants reach and a real application. When Management Science read your contribution as an analytics or optimization method that does not change a management decision, EJOR engages the method and its application directly rather than asking whether the whole business audience will care. It is a large, competitive Elsevier journal, so it absorbs strong applied-OR work that the INFORMS flagships found too narrow on the management side.

Best for: an applied operational-research or analytics method with a concrete application, where the technique is the contribution.

6. Decision Sciences

Decision Sciences is the cross-functional managerial-decision-making venue spanning operations, supply chain, and information systems. It is the right step when the result is a genuine decision-making contribution that sits below the Management Science bar for cross-department novelty but still travels across functional areas. It rewards work that ties methodology to a managerial decision, which is exactly the framing a Management Science paper already has, so the reformatting cost is low.

Best for: a cross-functional decision result spanning ops, supply chain, or IS that needed a strong field home rather than the flagship.

7. INFORMS Journal on Computing (IJOC)

IJOC publishes work at the intersection of operations research and computer science, where the computing contribution, such as an algorithm or a computational advance, is central. If your Management Science rejection turned on the paper being a computational method with the management story as a wrapper, IJOC is the venue where the computing contribution is the point. It is the honest target when the real advance is the algorithm rather than the decision it supports.

Best for: OR-meets-computer-science work where the algorithmic or computational contribution is the core result.

The single most important fact about moving on from Management Science: the INFORMS family has no automatic transfer. Unlike Elsevier's Article Transfer Service or Springer's transfer desk, there is no one-click route that carries your files and reviewer reports from Management Science to Operations Research, M&SOM, Marketing Science, or the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics.

A rejecting Department Editor may say in the decision letter that the work fits a sister venue better, but acting on that is a fresh submission, with a new editorial clock and a new reviewer pool. Treat the suggestion as a routing hint, not a transfer.

That changes the order in which you climb the ladder, because there is no free report-carrying rung. A realistic ladder for a Management Science-quality paper looks like this:

• Sister INFORMS tier: Operations Research if the contribution is OR theory or method, the INFORMS Journal on Computing if the computing contribution is central, M&SOM if it is a focused operations-management problem, Organization Science if it is genuine organization theory, or Marketing Science if it is quantitative marketing.

These are the venues a Management Science Department Editor most often points to, but each is a new submission.

• Non-INFORMS specialist tier: Production and Operations Management for broad OM, the European Journal of Operational Research for applied analytics, or Decision Sciences for cross-functional decision-making.

These widen the field beyond INFORMS when the sister venues are not the right fit.

• Field-specialty tier: the top journal in your exact subfield (for example, a supply-chain, information-systems, or healthcare-operations specialty venue), where specialist referees value the work the multidisciplinary flagship could not place.

If Management Science desk-rejected fast (a Department Editor decision in the first one to three weeks), that is almost always a department-fit or breadth signal, so move to the sister venue or specialist journal that owns the contribution now. If reviewers raised substantive concerns, fix them first; the same gaps will surface at the next journal, and because the OM and management referee pool for a given topic is small, you may draw overlapping reviewers.

In our pre-submission review work with Management Science submissions, four named rejection patterns generate the most consistent desk and post-review rejections, and each one points to a different next step. Each maps to Management Science's editorial culture of demanding a contribution that changes a management decision and travels across departments, screened at a fast desk pace by a handling Department Editor.

Across the management and operations manuscripts we review, knowing which pattern applies to your paper is the difference between a productive move and a second rejection from the same root cause.

A method or analytics advance with no management decision changed. Across our Management Science pre-submission reviews, the most common reason a technically strong paper stalls is that the contribution is a sharper bound, a faster algorithm, or a new estimator with no managerial consequence stated. Management Science is not the home for an operations-research or analytics method that does not change a management decision.

We apply a blunt test to the abstract and introduction: cross out every sentence about the technique. If no management claim survives, the paper belongs at Operations Research, the INFORMS Journal on Computing, or EJOR, and the fix is either to supply the management consequence or to redirect the paper to a method-first venue.

The paper was aimed at the wrong department. A second recurring pattern is a submission routed to a handling department by habit or seniority rather than by which audience owns the result. A finance-flavored operations paper sent to Finance, or a data-heavy marketing paper sent to Data Science, lands with a Department Editor whose reviewers judge it against the wrong bar, and the abstract does the routing damage before figure one is read.

The fix is to identify the department whose readers actually own the headline result and, when the next venue is M&SOM or Organization Science, to reframe the introduction around the contribution that venue cares about.

Breadth is asserted but the result speaks only to one subfield. Many otherwise strong Management Science papers claim multidisciplinary importance in one sentence while the actual result matters only to specialists in one exact setting. Because the Department Editor screens the abstract for whether the contribution travels beyond a single specialty's readership, a breadth claim the methods and findings do not support reads as rhetoric.

When that is the issue, the honest move is the field flagship: Production and Operations Management for OM, Decision Sciences for cross-functional decision work, or the specialty journal that owns the topic, where the result does not have to clear a cross-department bar it cannot meet.

The empirical or identification package is not airtight before review. For empirical submissions, Management Science reviewers and the Department Editor expect the identification argument, the robustness checks, the sample size and effect-size reporting, and the data and code disclosure to hold up before review, not to be promised in a revision.

We see papers where the headline result is convincing but the identifying assumption is asserted in one sentence, the alternative specifications are thin, or the replication package is incomplete. That is a substance gap every serious OM or management venue will flag, so strengthen the identification section, the robustness appendix, and the disclosure package, then resubmit; otherwise the next set of reviewers rejects for the same reason.

Across these patterns, the operative distinction is fit versus substance. A fit rejection means the work is sound but aimed at the wrong department, the wrong breadth, or the wrong INFORMS venue, and you move to the journal that owns the contribution. A substance rejection in the identification, robustness, or management-contribution layer means the next journal will reject for the same reason unless you do the work first.

Speaking from the editor's side of the desk: when Department Editors screen a Management Science submission during triage, they are not asking whether the analysis is competent. They assume it is. They are asking two questions first. Which department owns this, and is the contribution broad enough that a Management Science reader outside the immediate subfield would care?

If the abstract reads as a single-field method advance with no management consequence, editors route the decision toward a sister INFORMS journal before the paper reaches a reviewer. If the breadth claim is rhetoric the result does not earn, editors reject on the cross-department bar.

The papers that clear the desk are the ones where the department choice is obvious and the management contribution is stated plainly, which is exactly the case you have to rebuild for the next venue.

Don't just resubmit the paper to the next journal unchanged. The most expensive mistake after a Management Science rejection is treating every rejection as a fit problem and moving an unrevised manuscript when it needs real work. If reviewers raised concerns about your identification strategy, your robustness package, or whether the contribution changes a management decision, the next set of reviewers will see the same gaps, and because the OM and management referee pool for a given topic is small, you may draw overlapping reviewers at the sister venue.

Be honest about which rejection you got. A fast Department Editor desk rejection in the first one to three weeks is almost always a department-fit, breadth, or management-contribution signal: the editor judged the work better suited to a sister INFORMS venue or short of the cross-department bar, and the paper itself may be fine to move now.

A post-review rejection with substantive reviewer reports is a different message; those reports are the most valuable feedback your paper will get for free, and ignoring them to chase a faster resubmission wastes them. Read them as a roadmap, not a verdict, and carry the revised analysis into the next submission.

An appeal is rarely the answer. Appeals at Management Science succeed only when you can show the handling Department Editor misread a central result, and a department-fit or insufficient-management-contribution desk rejection is almost never reversible. Because there is no report-carrying transfer to make the appeal queue worth the wait, your time is better spent reframing the contribution and choosing the right next venue than contesting this one.