Editorial: On the stewardship of IJPDLM in 2026 – from Polestars to practice

Abstract

At the beginning of 2025, we introduced what we referred to as “Our Polestars” as we took over as co-Editors-in-Chief (EiCs) of the International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management (IJPDLM). These were guiding principles that we intended to follow to keep the journal directionally consistent even as the field's topics, data, methods and technologies evolved (Russo and Rao, 2025). Central to that editorial was a simple but demanding claim: modern Supply Chain Management (SCM) research is about more than boxes on a truck; it is, at its heart, about people. It is about workers, consumers, patients, policy makers, donors, citizens, migrants and communities whose lives are shaped by how supply chains are designed and governed.That lens – one that focused on people, purpose and performance – became even more consequential during 2025. IJPDLM experienced extraordinary growth in submissions, the field continued to broaden substantively and methodologically, and the demand for scholarship that is simultaneously rigorous and socially grounded intensified. We therefore use this 2026 editorial to reiterate those guiding principles. In this editorial we will (1) summarize our work as co-EiCs in 2025, and present key journal metrics and initiatives as well as our expectations for 2026, (2) look back at the year that was in terms of scholarship published at IJPDLM, (3) lay out our vision for 2026 and (4) discuss the Early Career Editorial Review Board (EC-ERB) program.In 2025, IJPDLM received nearly 700 submissions, up from 504 in 2024 – an increase of roughly 40% in a single year. This growth reflects both the vitality of global SCM research and the trust that the global community placed in IJPDLM in 2025. However, growth at this scale reshapes the journal's daily workflow. It affects associate editor bandwidth, reviewer fatigue, desk screening decisions and the speed at which manuscripts move through the pipeline. It also alters the composition of papers submitted to the journal. Submitted papers now represent more geographic diversity, more methodological diversity and wider variation in how authors interpret IJPDLM's mission.Despite this growth, IJPDLM's core performance indicators remained stable. The acceptance rate at IJPDLM was approximately 8% in 2025. The papers published have contributed to IJPDLM achieving its highest-ever Impact Factor (7.4) and CiteScore (14.1). While we acknowledge the limitations of such metrics, these achievements reflect the journal's growing recognition, and your high-quality work has played a key role in this success. This reflects the journal's continued commitment to publishing only the most rigorous scholarship. While the average time to first decision increased slightly from 30 to 32 days, for papers that received a revision, the average decision time for post-revision articles decreased from 33 to 31 days. Our desk reject rate stood at approximately 80%, with desk-rejected papers being returned to authors in an average of 13 days.We do not view desk rejection as a “shortcut”; instead, we view it as a triage mechanism that protects reviewer capacity for manuscripts with a realistic path to contribution. At the same time, desk decisions should be explainable. Authors should understand whether a paper is misaligned with IJPDLM's domain, insufficiently grounded in logistics and physical distribution phenomena, underdeveloped theoretically or methodologically, or incremental relative to existing knowledge. Therefore, every desk rejection was accompanied by detailed feedback regarding why the paper was sent back.Outside of only a handful of cases, we did not recommend resubmitting the same paper to us, and this is a practice we will continue to follow. Resubmitting a rejected paper to the same journal is widely regarded as poor professional practice and creates unnecessary strain on the review system. We continue to encourage authors to engage with IJPDLM's editorial guidance on quality thresholds and common pitfalls, as highlighted in Russo and Wong (2024). Additionally, because we are unlikely to advance papers that (1) treat the SCM context as incidental, (2) lack clear theoretical underpinning, or (3) rely exclusively on single-source, self-reported measures as proxies for operational phenomena without a strong design rationale, we encourage authors to pay particular attention to these aspects of their paper prior to submission.In years of rapid growth, such as we experienced in 2025, journals face a familiar tension: the need to make faster turnarounds while also offering clarity and developmental guidance. We view timeliness as both an ethical and operational goal: timely decisions matter, especially for early-career scholars whose careers depend on credible and predictable review cycles. We commit to holding to the high standards of timeliness from 2025 in 2026 and beyond. To achieve this, we have an appeal to our review community and our senior associate editors (SAEs). Our community is counting on you to provide timely, fair and consistent review comments. This means we expect the following from you:These continue to be our guiding principles. While we maintain an unwavering commitment to publishing rigorous research that advances both theory and practice in SCM, we will also be responsive, fair and consistent. Additionally, we reiterate our commitment that papers appearing in IJPDLM are primarily empirical and will continue to be so. While we remain open to normative and conceptual papers, they must be anchored in real-world, empirical observations.It is impossible to do justice to the full range of work IJPDLM published across 2025 in a single editorial. However, we can identify clusters of contributions and demonstrate through selected exemplars how IJPDLM authors are expanding the field's theory, methods and topics in line with the goals highlighted in the Polestars editorial (Russo and Rao, 2025).One prominent stream in 2025 centered on consumer-centric supply chains, particularly where time, impatience and service design interact with physical distribution decisions. A notable example is the work by Paluzzi et al. (2025), which examines consumer impatience in the e-commerce home delivery context. This paper advances a time-based competition perspective by explicitly linking consumer behavioral tendencies to last-mile logistics design choices and performance outcomes. What distinguishes this work—and others like it in 2025—is its refusal to treat consumers as exogenous demand generators. Instead, consumers are modeled as active participants whose preferences, tolerance thresholds and behavioral responses shape the effectiveness of the delivery system. This represents a meaningful step forward in aligning IJPDLM's physical distribution roots with contemporary omnichannel and e-commerce realities, as well as our inaugural editorial that highlighted our vision of SCM being about more than boxes and trucks.Another important stream in 2025 deepened our understanding of supply chain risk and resilience by bringing network structure to the foreground. A notable example is the study by Carnovale et al. (2025), which shows how network features such as centrality and clustering interact with firm-level risk management strategies to influence both disruption exposure and recovery. Rather than viewing resilience as a one-size-fits-all capability, this work highlights that investments in detection and recovery yield different returns depending on a firm's position in the network. What sets this research apart is its shift away from linear, firm-centric models of risk toward a more relational perspective, where vulnerability and resilience arise from patterns of interdependence. In doing so, the paper underscores the value of integrating network science into physical distribution and logistics research, offering managers concrete guidance for designing supply chains that are not only efficient but also structurally resilient in an increasingly uncertain environment.Another important contribution of 2025 lies in the methodological strengthening of retail and distribution research, particularly through experimental and scenario-based approaches grounded in operational realism. Ta et al. (2025) provide a detailed methodological article on designing scenario-based experiments in retail SCM. Rather than positioning experimentation as abstract or laboratory-bound, this paper offers concrete guidance on how experimental designs can be used to examine inventory, assortment, fulfillment and coordination decisions under realistic constraints. From an editorial perspective, this paper exemplifies the kind of methodological contribution that IJPDLM seeks to promote – i.e. work that not only applies a method but also teaches the field how to study operational mechanisms more effectively. In doing so, it supports a broader shift toward causal inference and decision-level insight in SCM research. We anticipate that this paper will establish the standard for experiment-based papers at IJPDLM over the next few years.The I&T section continued to play an important role in 2025 by providing space for forward-looking yet operationally feasible research. A clear example is Purtell et al. (2025), who envision a transformation of middle-mile logistics using extended-range cargo drones. Published in 2025, this paper does not simply speculate about technology adoption; it engages with routing structures, infrastructure requirements, regulatory constraints and cost-service trade-offs. In a separate I&T piece, Klumpp et al. (2026) identify a fundamental limitation in SCM research – i.e. the treatment of human workers as interchangeable inputs. They propose applied neuroscience to capture individual-level variability in performance, safety and well-being. By illustrating how neurobiological response monitoring can provide continuous, real-time insights beyond traditional self-report measures, their paper points to a human-centered frontier for SCM research.These contributions reflect the intent of the I&T category: to surface emerging SCM configurations early, while still grounding them in the language of operations, physical distribution and system design. Both papers are also aligned with our call, as EiCs, to push the boundaries across disciplines in order to better understand how to identify and anticipate breakthrough innovation and transformation in the supply chain domain. In 2025, this section increasingly functioned as a bridge between speculative innovation and mainstream IJPDLM scholarship. We anticipate seeing more such consequential papers in the I&T section of the journal in 2026.The 2025 issues of IJPDLM also continued the journal's tradition of publishing work that reframes familiar SCM problems through new conceptual lenses. Thomas (2025) advances a value-in-use perspective on retail stockout costs, moving beyond traditional lost-sales metrics to consider experiential, behavioral and downstream operational consequences of product unavailability. Although stockouts are among the most studied phenomena in retail operations, this paper demonstrates how reconceptualization, rather than entirely new data, can still yield meaningful theoretical advancements. It also reinforces IJPDLM's emphasis on linking physical distribution decisions to broader notions of customer value and system performance.Some of our personal favorite pieces from this year highlighted research that showed sustainability outcomes in logistics are increasingly shaped by the measurement and governance infrastructures that define accountability, rather than by isolated operational initiatives alone. Dukovska-Popovska et al. (2025) showed that effective end-of-life textile recovery depends on how first-mile collection systems are designed, communicated and monitored, while Acocella et al. (2025) demonstrated that the sustainability implications of warehousification remain poorly governed in the absence of integrated spatial and social metrics. Complementing these perspectives, Solakivi et al. (2026) reveal how fragmented emissions regulations and inconsistent reporting across transport chains undermine system-level decarbonization by encouraging compliance optimization rather than substantive change. Collectively, these studies underscore the need to treat metrics, data architectures, public policy and institutional arrangements as central design variables in sustainable physical distribution. We strongly encourage further research that examines how measurement systems themselves enable (or constrain) meaningful sustainability outcomes in SCM.Taken together, IJPDLM's 2025 papers signal several broader shifts. (1) From themes to mechanisms – i.e. rather than introducing entirely new topics, many 2025 papers sharpened causal logic, decision pathways and operational trade-offs within established domains; (2) From abstraction to realism – i.e. experimental, analytical and conceptual work increasingly emphasized decision realism and institutional constraints; (3) From efficiency alone to value and experience – consumer impatience, value-in-use and service design featured prominently, reinforcing IJPDLM's long-standing focus on physical distribution as experienced and (4) From technology as novelty to technology as system component – i.e. Frontier technologies (e.g. drones, carbon calculators) were examined as parts of logistics systems rather than standalone innovations. These patterns align closely with the Polestars articulated at the beginning of 2025: supply chain research that is grounded in operations, attentive to people and oriented toward improving real-world outcomes. As we look forward to 2026, we see the work published in 2025 not as an endpoint, but as a strong foundation on which the next wave of IJPDLM scholarship can build.Building on these patterns in the scholarship published in 2025, we now turn to how we hope to further shape IJPDLM's role in 2026.A major editorial priority in 2025 was strengthening IJPDLM's role not only as a publisher of excellent research but also as an agenda setter. We view the “Perspectives” section of the journal as a mechanism for doing just that. Perspective pieces are not conventional literature reviews; rather, they are forward-thinking papers that identify under-examined issues, specify why they matter and challenge the field to examine them by laying out credible roadmaps.Perspective pieces can begin in one of two ways. Either we will reach out to senior and well-established authors in the field and invite them to contribute a perspective on a topic where we would like our community to contribute more scholarship. Or well-established authors with a history of impactful research can reach out to either of us and propose a perspective piece on a topic of their expertise. In either case, perspective pieces undergo the same rigorous peer review that all other papers undergo. The only difference is that perspective pieces must be forward-looking and should challenge our community to do something new/different. The disability inclusion perspective piece, published in 2025 (Cole and Narayanan, 2026), is an important exemplar of how we want perspectives to function.Cole and Narayanan (2026) expanded the field's inclusion discourse beyond the categories most commonly studied and invited the community to engage with disability as an operational and social reality. It also aligns with our framing in the “Our Polestars” editorial from 2025. If supply chains are about people, we must examine which people are enabled or excluded by supply chain designs (Russo and Rao, 2025). Another excellent example is Kembro et al. (2025), which identifies six common pitfalls that lead to literature review-type papers being rejected. It offers guidance to improve rigor and generativity, helping researchers produce literature reviews that successfully advance through the peer review process. This represents a milestone for IJPDLM and a reference point for scholars who wish to embark on high-quality review papers that contribute to advancing the body of knowledge in the field.Building on that momentum, we are actively working with leading international scholars on developing other perspective pieces on artificial intelligence in SCM (emphasizing governance, ethics and accountability), neuro tools in SCM (deepening behavioral and cognition-based research), SCM and food security (distribution bottlenecks and equity under climate and geopolitical stress), SCM challenges in emerging markets, and immigrant inclusion in SCM (labor, dignity and institutional structures) and the dynamics of managerial behavior in the face of the constant transformation of SCM. The goal is not merely to comment on trends but to drive research where operational relevance and societal impact intersect. We are hopeful that these pieces will encourage research on these topics not only in IJPDLM but also in the wider SCM scholarly community.SCM issues are inherently global. Yet, the global nature of the phenomenon has not always been reflected in the global representation of voices in the literature. One of our explicit priorities has been to strengthen IJPDLM's position as a genuinely global journal—not only in the topics of papers, but also in the composition of authors, reviewers, editors and the shaping of the research agenda (Russo and Rao, 2025). In 2026, we will pursue further global representation through the diversification of our editorial board and reviewer pool, the encouragement of context-rich theory-building and an openness to special issues that leverage regional phenomena to advance generalizable insights. Our guiding belief is that inclusivity and rigor are not competing values; done well, they strengthen each other.Special issues are among IJPDLM's most powerful vehicles for shaping research trajectories. 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To our and associate you for the work you do in the scholarly quality of our journal. To our you for with the research, it and helping to turn it into knowledge. To all of as we move into 2026, we invite you to us research that is grounded and and which theory forward while anchored in the operational of SCM as we highlighted in “Our Polestars” and we invite you to us your research in SCM that is and and for what Russo and