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ijoc-topic-selection

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Use when deciding whether a project is computing-first enough for an INFORMS Journal on Computing (IJOC) submission and which of its 10 technical areas fits. Scopes the contribution to the OR↔computing interface; it does not invent results or citations.

INFORMS-Journal-on-Computing-Skills/skills/ijoc-topic-selection/SKILL.md

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# Topic Selection (ijoc-topic-selection)

## When to trigger

- You have an OR/analytics result and are unsure whether the **computing is the contribution** or merely the vehicle
- You cannot say which of IJOC's **10 technical areas** the paper belongs to, or it straddles two
- The work could plausibly go to *Operations Research*, *Management Science*, *Mathematical Programming Computation*, or an ACM/IEEE venue and you need to decide
- A coauthor wants the "is this an IJOC paper?" call before any writing starts

## The IJOC scope test

IJOC sits at the **intersection of OR/MS and computer science**. A paper passes the scope test only if the **computational and/or methodological advance is the headline** — a new algorithm, a sharper formulation, a learning method that helps an OR task, a simulation or computational-probability method, or tooling that changes what OR practitioners can compute. Run the four questions in order; a "no" on Q1 usually means a different journal.

1. **Is the news computational/methodological, not the application?** "We solved a logistics problem with CPLEX" is not IJOC; "we designed a decomposition that solves an order-of-magnitude larger logistics instance" is. The application motivates; the method is the contribution.
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