Omega

About Omega

Omega — The International Journal of Management Science: Journal Profile

Omega, subtitled The International Journal of Management Science, is a peer-reviewed journal published by Elsevier that reports on advances in operations analytics and management sciences. The publisher's current description is precise about the kind of work it wants: submissions that use data and problem-driven models and techniques to address practical optimisation and business analytics challenges, that present effective and contemporary modelling and solution approaches for novel application areas, or that achieve breakthroughs in solving established problems in application domains of considerable interest. Submissions are expected to be of high quality and relevance, written so that a wide-ranging readership of academics, practitioners and managers can follow them, and preference is given to papers with implications for the practice of management. Print ISSN 0305-0483; online ISSN 1873-5274.

The one-word title creates a real identification problem, and this profile addresses it directly. The Journals World record anchored here (post title “Omega”, slug omega, publisher Elsevier BV, ISSNs 0305-0483 and 1873-5274) is the management science journal. It is not Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, a separate SAGE journal about thanatology with ISSNs 0030-2228 and 1541-3764, which has its own Journals World record. It is also not a mathematics, engineering or religious-studies title that happens to share the Greek letter as a name. Whenever a citation, a ranking list or a library entry simply says “Omega”, the ISSN pair is the only reliable way to tell which journal is meant.

Quick Facts

• Full title: Omega — The International Journal of Management Science
• Publisher: Elsevier (historically listed as Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd)
• Print ISSN: 0305-0483
• Online ISSN: 1873-5274
• Founded: 1973, according to Scopus-based and other secondary listings
• Editor-in-Chief: Joe Zhu, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States — as listed on the publisher's ScienceDirect journal page when this profile was compiled
• Previous long-serving Editor-in-Chief: Benjamin Lev (2002–2025), according to secondary biographical sources
• Subject areas (publisher): Information Systems and Management; Management Science and Operations Research; Strategy and Management
• Access model: Hybrid — subscription publication with no author fee, or open access for an article publishing charge
• Open access charge listed by the publisher: USD 3,960 excluding taxes, on the ScienceDirect journal page fetched for this profile; the publisher notes the amount a given author pays may differ and may be reduced under an institutional agreement
• Publisher-reported metrics on that page: CiteScore 14.9 and Impact Factor 7.2 — see the metrics section for how to read these dated figures

History and Development

Omega was established in 1973, in the period when operational research was moving from its wartime and early industrial origins into business schools and management practice. Secondary listings consistently give 1973 as the start year, and the journal's coverage in citation databases runs from that year to the present. For most of its life it was published under the Pergamon imprint within Elsevier, from Oxford in the United Kingdom — the address still shown in older journal directories is The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford — and older directory entries describe it as appearing eight times a year, while other listings describe a bimonthly pattern; frequency labels in directories have varied over the decades and the journal now publishes continuously online through ScienceDirect with dated issues, so authors should rely on the live ScienceDirect site rather than a directory frequency label.

The journal's editorial leadership provides a useful marker of its modern era. Benjamin Lev, a professor of decision sciences at Drexel University known for work on inventory control, mathematical programming, operations planning and scheduling, and data envelopment analysis, served as Editor-in-Chief from 2002 to 2025, according to biographical sources — a tenure of more than two decades that coincided with the journal's growth into one of the most cited titles in management science. The publisher's current ScienceDirect page lists Joe Zhu of Worcester Polytechnic Institute as Editor-in-Chief. Zhu is himself a prominent figure in data envelopment analysis and performance measurement research, a specialism with a long presence in the journal's pages. The publisher is also marking the journal's longevity directly: calls for papers on ScienceDirect describe special issues prepared for the journal's 55th anniversary in 2028, including collections on data-driven optimisation for smart cities, on digital operations and logistics systems, and on data envelopment analysis — themes that map closely onto the journal's historic strengths.

An older statement of the journal's aims, still reproduced by several directories, described Omega as reporting on developments in management, publishing original contributions and review articles that describe the state of the art in specific fields or functions of management, together with shorter critical assessments of particular management techniques, a “Memoranda” section for short communications, and a “Feedback” correspondence column, for an audience of practising managers, specialists in management services, operational research workers, management scientists, consultants, academics and students. The current publisher description has tightened that language around operations analytics, data and problem-driven modelling — a shift in emphasis that reflects where the field itself has moved — but the underlying contract is unchanged: rigorous modelling, in the service of real management problems, written to be read by both researchers and practitioners.

Scope in Detail

Operations analytics and management science

The centre of the journal is the use of analytical models to understand and improve decisions in organisations: operations research, optimisation, simulation, decision analysis and the wider management science toolkit, applied to problems in production, logistics, services, health care, energy, finance and the public sector. A strong Omega paper normally does three things at once: it formulates a real problem precisely, it develops a model or method that advances how such problems can be solved, and it shows — through real data, a serious case, or a convincing computational study — that the advance matters in practice.

Data-driven and problem-driven work

The publisher's emphasis on data and problem-driven models distinguishes the journal from purely theoretical outlets. Papers that start from a data set, a company's planning problem, a hospital's scheduling difficulty or a city's transport challenge, and build the theory needed to address it, are squarely in scope. So are papers that bring contemporary data methods — machine learning, large-scale analytics and related techniques — into management science, provided the management problem, not the algorithm alone, remains the contribution. A generic algorithm applied to a standard test data set, with no organisational problem at its centre, is a much weaker fit.

Established problems, solved better

The publisher explicitly welcomes breakthroughs in solving established problems in application domains of considerable interest, as well as work in novel application areas. That matters for fields with long Omega traditions — scheduling, inventory, supply chain design, facility location, revenue management, and efficiency and productivity measurement among them — where the contribution may be a materially better solution approach, a new structural insight, or evidence from an application that changes what practitioners should do. Novelty in this journal can therefore mean a new problem, a new method, or a decisively better answer to an old and important problem.

Practice implications and readability

Two stated editorial preferences should shape how a manuscript is written. Preference is given to papers with implications for the practice of management, and submissions are expected to be written in a manner accessible to a wide-ranging readership of academics, practitioners and managers. In practice that means the introduction must explain the managerial problem in plain terms before the mathematics begins, the results section must say what a decision-maker should do differently, and notation should be introduced rather than assumed. A technically strong paper that never leaves its own formalism is working against the journal's stated aims, however good its theorems are.

Article Types

The publisher welcomes four named types of submission. Innovative Applications present unique and effective solutions to real-world challenges. Theory and Methodology Advances offer new contributions to the methodologies and theoretical foundations of management sciences and operations analytics. Invited Reviews are comprehensive reviews that inform the broader management sciences audience about recent progress on a specific topic — note that these are invited, so an author with a review proposal should contact the editorial office rather than submitting an unsolicited review manuscript. Short Communications are brief reports that address significant shortcomings or limitations identified in recent Omega publications — a deliberately self-correcting format that lets the journal's own published record be challenged and improved in its own pages. Earlier eras of the journal also carried Memoranda and a Feedback correspondence column, described in the older aims statement reproduced by directories; authors should follow the four current categories on ScienceDirect when framing a submission.

Editorial Process and Publisher-Reported Timelines

Elsevier publishes a set of journal insight figures for Omega on ScienceDirect, and they are reproduced here as publisher-reported figures at the time this profile was compiled, not as guarantees for any individual manuscript. The page reported 3 days from submission to first decision, 73 days from submission to decision after review, 244 days from submission to acceptance, and 8 days from acceptance to online publication. Read together, those figures describe a journal that screens quickly at the desk stage — a first decision in days usually means a fast editorial assessment of fit and quality, which is where many out-of-scope or under-developed papers will end — and then takes the time that serious modelling work requires for review, revision and re-review, with the long submission-to-acceptance figure reflecting papers that go through one or more major revisions. Authors should plan for that pattern: a fast first response is plausible, a fast acceptance is not promised, and a paper that survives review should expect to be improved, sometimes substantially, before it appears.

Submissions are made through Elsevier's editorial system linked from the journal's ScienceDirect page, following the journal's Guide for Authors. Because Omega gives preference to practice-relevant, accessibly written work, the cover materials and the opening pages of the manuscript carry unusual weight: they are where the editor decides whether the paper speaks to the journal's dual academic and practitioner audience, or only to a narrow technical circle that would be better served elsewhere.

Indexing and Metrics — With Sources and Dates

The publisher's insights page lists Omega's abstracting and indexing as including Scopus, the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), the SCImago Journal Rank, SNIP, and the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) list. That combination — both major Web of Science indexes for a management journal, Scopus coverage since 1973, and a business-school list presence — is part of why the journal is widely used in business and management assessment exercises.

On metrics, the publisher's ScienceDirect page fetched for this profile displayed a CiteScore of 14.9 and an Impact Factor of 7.2. Secondary aggregators consulted at the same time reported figures in a similar range but not identical numbers — one listing gave an impact factor of 6.9 for a later cycle, SCImago-based listings gave an SJR of about 2.65–2.68, a CiteScore of 13.8 in one listing, and an h-index reported variously as 160, 167 or 175 depending on source and year. Those disagreements are normal: each figure belongs to a specific database, a specific year's release and a specific counting method, and they move every year. The defensible summary is that Omega sits in the first quartile (Q1) of its Scopus subject categories — Information Systems and Management, Management Science and Operations Research, and Strategy and Management — in the listings consulted, and that it is one of the higher-impact general management science journals. Any figure used for a formal purpose should be taken from the current Journal Citation Reports, Scopus or SCImago release for the relevant year, with its source named, rather than copied from this or any other profile.

Publishing Options and Charges

Omega is a hybrid journal. Under the subscription option, no publication fee is charged to authors, and published articles are available to subscribers. Under the open access option, an article publishing charge applies; the ScienceDirect page fetched for this profile listed USD 3,960 excluding taxes, while noting that the actual charge may differ based on individual author circumstances and may be reduced during submission if an institutional agreement applies. Because a search-result summary of the same publisher page showed a different figure (USD 4,180), authors must treat any quoted charge as time-sensitive and confirm the amount in the submission system at the moment they submit — this profile reports both figures with their sources rather than presenting either as permanently correct. Funders that require open access can normally be satisfied through the open access route; authors without such a requirement can publish under the subscription route without a fee, which remains an important practical distinction between Omega and fully open access journals in the same field.

Who Should Submit — and the Traps to Avoid

Omega is a strong target for a management science paper that solves a real problem better than it has been solved before, for an operations analytics study built around genuine data and a genuine decision, and for methodological work whose value to practice is argued explicitly rather than left implicit. It is a poor target for a purely abstract optimisation paper with no application in view, for a single-firm case description with no generalisable model or insight, for a survey that merely summarises without synthesis, and for work whose real home is a neighbouring discipline — a pure economics, pure computer science or pure statistics contribution will usually be asked what its management science contribution is, and needs a convincing answer. The commonest avoidable failures follow from the journal's own stated preferences: forgetting the practice implications section, writing only for specialists in one technique, and submitting a review without an invitation. Address those three points, confirm the current charge and article type on ScienceDirect, and a submission to Omega will at least be judged on the grounds the journal itself declares.

Special Issues as a Map of the Field

The anniversary special issues announced on the publisher's site are a practical map of where the journal's editors believe management science is heading, and prospective authors can use them that way even if they never submit to a special issue. The smart-cities collection centres on data-driven optimisation for urban systems — transport, energy, logistics and public services treated as connected decision problems rather than isolated ones. The digital operations collection, framed for the journal's 55th year, addresses how platform, sensor and automation technologies redesign operations and logistics, and asks what management science can explain, design, optimise and govern in that next generation of systems. The data envelopment analysis collection gathers a method community that has published in Omega for decades, around performance measurement, productivity analysis and decision support. An author working in any of these areas should read the calls carefully, note their stated submission deadlines in 2027, and also note what they reveal about regular issues: these are not marginal topics for the journal, they are presented as frontier and commemorative themes. Conversely, a paper that fits none of the journal's historic or announced directions faces a harder argument about why Omega, rather than a specialist title, is its natural home.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Omega's ISSNs?
Print ISSN 0305-0483 and online ISSN 1873-5274, as listed by the publisher on ScienceDirect.

Is this the same Omega as the journal about death and dying?
No. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying is a separate SAGE journal (ISSNs 0030-2228 and 1541-3764) about thanatology. This profile covers Elsevier's Omega, The International Journal of Management Science (ISSNs 0305-0483 and 1873-5274).

Who is the Editor-in-Chief?
The publisher's ScienceDirect page listed Joe Zhu of Worcester Polytechnic Institute when this profile was compiled. His predecessor, Benjamin Lev, served from 2002 to 2025 according to secondary biographical sources. Mastheads change, so check ScienceDirect for the current listing.

When was Omega founded?
1973, according to Scopus-based and other secondary listings. The publisher is preparing special issues for the journal's 55th anniversary in 2028.

Is Omega open access?
It is hybrid. Authors may publish under the subscription route with no publication fee, or choose open access for an article publishing charge — listed as USD 3,960 excluding taxes on the publisher page fetched for this profile, with a different figure appearing in a search summary of that page, so confirm the live amount at submission.

How long does review take?
Publisher-reported insight figures at compilation were 3 days to first decision, 73 days to decision after review, and 244 days to acceptance. These are journal-level reported figures, not promises for an individual paper.

Profile compiled October 2026 from the publisher's official ScienceDirect journal and insights pages (aims and scope, article types, subject areas, ISSNs, indexing list, metrics display, publishing options and timelines, Editor-in-Chief listing and anniversary special-issue calls), with founding year, predecessor editorship and historical aims attributed to secondary listings and biographical sources as noted in the text. Charges, editors and metrics change; verify them on the live ScienceDirect pages before submitting.