Knowledge that Transforms

George Dantzig introduced the world to the power of optimization, creating trillions of dollars of value and saving countless years of life across the globe. Linear programs and Dantzig's many other contributions to optimization have driven enormous increases in productivity throughout the global economy. Linear programming has also become a vital tool in advancing artificial intelligence and machine learning.

This is an exploratory study to analyze the permeation of the term/word “analytics” in the operations management domain by reviewing 2175 papers published in the Production and Operations Management journal (POMJ) since its inception in the winter 1992 until the summer of 2022. We identify the words that commonly precede the term “analytics” in these papers. We also identify the most common words that appear in the research papers in which the term “analytics” has appeared. This analysis allows us to reflect on the contexts in which analytics studies have focused and the influence they might exert in future studies. Results show that the usage of the term “analytics” has increased from less than 2% of articles published in POMJ during the period (2007–2016) to about 1 out of every 10 articles published from 2020 to the summer of 2022.