2021 January Inside OR

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This issue: In this edition of Inside OR we look deeper into Chris Skidmore's Blackett Lecture on Superforecasters and moon shots: The Idea of Operational Research in the 21st Century and we look back at the plenary speakers from OR62 Dimitris Bertsimas and Ellen D Lewis. We also look at the results from the ORS Equality, diversity and inclusion survey and how modelling has featured heavily in the news during 2020. There are updates about our events, training, plus much more...

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OR rules

Francisco Sagasti, who became President of Peru on 17 November, is no stranger to the OR community nor to the UK - both as an associate researcher at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and from memorable presentations at both the LSE annual lecture on OR in Development and as Plenary speaker at IFORS 2002 in Edinburgh.

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Blackett Memorial Lecture 2021

The 2020 Blackett Memorial Lecture was given by the Rt Hon Chris Skidmore, MP for Kingswood and former UK Science, Research and Innovation Minister, on 24 November 2020 from his son’s bedroom rather than the more normal venue of the Royal Society because of COVID-19.

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Cite or be damned: Some Thoughts on Reviewer Coerced Citation

Some time ago, I was asked to edit a special issue of an overseas computer science journal. This involved the usual activities of collecting papers, identifying suitable reviewers, and then overseeing the reviews and revisions of each submission. In one case, a reviewer supplied an author with a long list of publications. They then strongly suggested that the inclusion of these works would influence whether they would recommend the paper’s acceptance or not. I was not particularly happy about this and, in my comments to the author, I made it clear that the citations should only be included in their revision if they were of “direct relevance” to their work.

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