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I am in the process of compiling a critical review of the field. Wanted to reach out to the community to get insight on top researchers so I can summarize the state of the art and see where the field is headed.

Thanks!

EhsanK
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Parikshit Sharma
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    Hi Parikshit and welcome to OR.SE. Your question, as it stands, is very broad as the OR is a broad field. For example, someone whose area of expertise is in TSP is not necessarily active in scheduling. – EhsanK Aug 05 '19 at 02:14
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    I think this question is too opinion-based, since "top" is not well defined. Potentially more problematic is that some of the "top researchers" (depending on how you define it) are active on this site, so opinions will carry some extra baggage. I would recommend that you make the question more specific (as @EhsanK suggested) and less opinion-based. For example, you might want to ask about effective methods for identifying the most-cited researchers in a particular subfield, etc. – LarrySnyder610 Aug 05 '19 at 02:28
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    @LarrySnyder610 I think that a good way to make this question less opinion based is to edit it to not directly ask who the "top" are, but rather how one would get a reasonable idea of who those people are and/or where a (sub)field of OR is headed. (an additional advantage is that the answers remain relevant if the "top" changes over the years) This seems to be the thrust of the two answers given so far as well. I'm not too sure how to phrase this best, however. – Discrete lizard Aug 05 '19 at 06:37
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    Greetings Parikshit. Unfortunately, I have to agree with the opinions expressed by the comments above. To make your question less broad, another suggestion could be asking for the most "Research Impact" / the largest h-index of OR researchers (both are still linked to number of citations). The former can be checked through ResearchGate if the researcher decides to present their findings there. By category/topic of OR could be another approach (as mentioned above) but perhaps you may wish to select the categories that most interest you. – ə̷̶̸͇̘̜́̍͗̂̄︣͟ Aug 05 '19 at 07:18

3 Answers3

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In addition to the other mentioned criteria, you can look up the plenary speakers at international OR conferences, or look at prizes awarded by organizations such as INFORMS and EURO.

Kevin Dalmeijer
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A better idea to understand the "state of the art and see where the field is headed" would be to look at the research being done instead of the researchers themselves. You could search Google Scholar for "optimization" (or any other OR term) and look at recent articles. Alternatively, you can look at recent articles in popular journals like Operations Research; a discussion on "top" OR journals can be found here.

dxb
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In my opinion the number of citations in Google Scholar can be one of the criteria. You can find the researchers in different branches of optimization and mathematical programming sorted by their citations and field of research. Simply click on the field of research to get the sorted list of all researchers in that field. But you need to consider the fact that some of the publications for instance books or review papers may affect the sorting.

Oguz Toragay
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