Next topics

Peter Klaus

Editorial

First online: 19.03.2011

DOI: 10.1007/s12159-011-0051-z

Cite this article as: Klaus, P. Logist. Res. (2011) 3: 1. doi:10.1007/s12159-011-0051-z

LOGISTICS RESEARCH, our European-based international journal of Business and Engineering Logistics research, is entering its third year of publication with the issue which you hold in your hands. And we have the good news: LOGISTICS RESEARCH is now listed in the Scopus database of abstracts and citations, which makes work published by our authors still more widely and more easily accessible. This is another step along the long road which any scholarly journal has to travel from its conception—in our case dating back about 10 years, when we started the German language predecessor journal LOGISTIK MANAGEMENT—to a high level ranking. This is our goal!

We thank our authors, reviewers, editors, and sponsors for helping us so effectively on this road. We will work hard to move ahead energetically. As a next step we will have a series of “special topic” issues to further support this effort:

Issue nr. 2/2011, the first in this series, will focus on “Autonomy and Decentralized Decision Making in Logistics”. Our special editors for this issue, Herbert Kopfer and Jörn Schönberger of Bremen University, received an excellent response to their call for papers. Two of those papers—by Libert and ten Hompel on “Ontology-Based Communication for the Decentralized Material Flow Control of Conveyor Facility” and by Jeon, Kim and Kopfer “Routing automated guided vehicles in Container Terminals through the Q-Learning Technique”—are in this issue already.

For the end of 2011 another LOGISTICS RESEARCH special topic issue is planned and a call for papers will be published soon on “Cooperative Logistics”, inviting state of the art contributions and critical reviews of past work and achievements in the fields of Supply Chain “Collaboration” and “Cooperation”. For 2012 and 2013 three more calls and special issues are being prepared on progress in the fields of “Virtual Engineering”, “Sustainable Logistics”, an “Scientific Methods in the Field of Logistics”.

In this issue you may find additional stimulation for “next topics” in the contributions by Arlbjoern, de Haas and Munksgaard on “Exploring Supply Chain Innovation” and Large on “Partner-specific Adaptations, Performance, Satisfaction and Loyalty in Third-Party Logistics Relationships”.

At last, I have a report included in this issue on a project which covers the otherwise little research field of institutional research in the logistics industry: “The Assessment of Competitive Intensity in Logistics Markets”. It intends to stimulate discussions about the markets and actors in our dynamic industry.

We look forward to stay in contact with you and invite you to continue submitting high quality manuscripts!

Peter Klaus

Editor-in-Chief: LOGISTICS RESEARCH

March 2011