Editors' Introduction

At the annual APICS Conference we recognized the recipients of the Best Paper Awards for papers published in the Summer 2015 through Spring 2016 issues. The selection committee chose for the first place award: "Implementing Off-peak Deliveries in the Greater Toronto Area: Cost, Benefits, Challenges" by Jessica McPhee, Ari Paunonen, Taufiq Ramji, and James H. Bookbinder (Fall 2015; vol. 54, no. 4). The paper, which addressed 32 routes and possible night-time delivery to over 4,500 customers in urban areas for Nestle Canada, provided an important contribution to the theory base while also offering valuable managerial implications. Their research provided a framework for regulatory, conceptual, and inertial obstacles to implementation.

The selection committee chose the paper by Adriana Rossiter Hoffer for the second-place honor. Her paper, titled "Are We in This Together? The Dynamics and Performance Implications of Dependence Asymmetry and Joint Dependence in Logistics Outsourcing Relationships," was also published in the Fall 2015 issue. The study, conducted in Brazil, indicated that customers embedded in relationships with high levels of joint dependence exhibit higher levels of long-term orientation toward operational information exchange with the 3PL.

In addition to the Best Paper Awards, we acknowledged the service and contribution of a reviewer. The recipient of the Outstanding Reviewer Award this year was Dr. John Saldanha. Unbeknownst to either of us until we began the process of selecting the best reviewer, we rely on John for critical review skills in specific topical areas as well as quantitative modeling techniques. John's service to TJ is commendable; he has provided comprehensive and robust reviews for authors that have enhanced the quality of their manuscripts.

Congratulating the award winners is a great segue to the special issue call for papers that follows this introduction. We are excited to have Dr. Douglas Hales and Dr. Jasmine Siu Lee Lam serve as guest editors for the themed Summer 2018 issue on global shipping and ports. We encourage you to submit your research on this topic to TJ for the special issue.

In closing, we would like to address an important issue for authors and reviewers. One of the most frequently asked questions we receive from the readers, especially from academic people, is "What is the acceptance rate of your journal?" This is a relevant question to many junior faculty members from the standpoint of choosing the target journal for their research. To address this question, we decided to report the journal's acceptance rate annually. Our intent is to report this figure in every spring issue, starting with this issue. Our method of calculating the acceptance rate is to simply divide the total number of articles published in a given year (e.g., 2016) by the total number of papers submitted during the year (2016). Submissions of revisions are not counted as separate submissions in order to produce conservative acceptance rates. We understand that this approach may not be the most accurate way of calculating the acceptance rate, as this does not reflect the proportion of papers submitted in 2016 that survived to acceptance. However, this approach allows us to compute the acceptance rate relatively easily and we believe that, in the long run, this rate will reflect the correct acceptance rate. Using this method, the acceptance rate of research papers for the year 2016 was computed as 13.2%, or equivalently, a rejection rate of 86.8%. We hope this information is helpful to our readers.

Respectively,
Yoshi Suzuki and Mary Holcomb, Co-Editors