Revealing the structure of combinative research design and performance in an operations management context

Abstract

This study defines the conceptual structure of combinative research design in operations management by relying on several proxies of combinative research topics, methods, and author affiliations, covering a decade of research and analyzing 1026 bibliographic records in an applied social science research context. Through the use of bibliometrics, co-word analyses are conducted to compute keyword co-occurrences to determine distinct interdisciplinary structures. Furthermore, this study conducts a series of regression analyses to determine the associations between combinative research (based on combinative topics, methods and author affiliations) and several proxies of article performance, including usage metrics (citations and views) and effort and time expenditures (the number of days under review and the number of revisions), while controlling for article age and the journal outlet. The results indicate strong associations with multi-country author affiliations with reduced effort and time expenditures as well as increased usage and scholarly attention. Future research directions are provided that integrate with replication studies, meta-analyses, and literature reviews.