| name | pom-writing-style |
| description | Use when revising the prose of a Production and Operations Management (POM) manuscript — front-loading the operations problem, balancing theory with practice relevance, applying author-year citations, and enforcing the 32-page cap with an e-companion split. Polishes prose; it does not build the model (pom-theory-development) or design exhibits (pom-tables-figures). |
Writing Style (pom-writing-style)
When to trigger
- The prose buries the operations problem or the managerial takeaway
- The main document is over the 32-page cap
- Method exposition crowds out the OM insight
- Citations are not in POM's author-year style
Write for a broad OM audience and for practicing managers
POM reviewers span method specialists and broad operations scholars, and the practice-relevance gate means the writing must convince both. Lead with the operations problem, setting, and decision; keep the method visible but subordinate to the OM insight. Pair theory and practice throughout: every theoretical claim should imply an operational consequence a manager can act on.
POM house conventions
- Citations: author-year (name-year) parenthetical in-text (e.g., Hayes & Pisano 1996 style) with an alphabetical reference list. Configure your reference manager accordingly.
- Abstract: maximum 350 words, with no formulas, references, or abbreviations. Write it for a Department Editor: problem, method family, key result, theory contribution, practice implication.
- Title: concise and descriptive, ≤ 25 words; supply 1–6 keywords.
- LaTeX: a journal-specific POM LaTeX template is provided/recommended for math-heavy papers; any software is acceptable.
Enforce the 32-page discipline
The main document is capped at 32 pages (1.5 spacing, 11-pt, one-inch margins) including abstract, tables, figures, appendices, and references. When over budget, move proofs, lengthy derivations, and extended robustness to the unlimited online e-companion rather than compressing the argument. Do not let method machinery consume pages the contribution needs.
Revision targets
- First page: decision, setting, mechanism, contribution — fast.
- Literature review: focused contrast that positions the paper, not a catalogue.
- Model/empirics: assumptions and validity stated in operational language.
- Discussion: actionable practice implications with boundary conditions.
Before/after micro-rewrites in POM's register
- Opening paragraph. Before: "In this paper, we develop a Markov decision process framework and characterize its structural properties." After: "Hospitals routinely divert transfer patients while downstream beds sit idle; we show when a two-threshold admission rule recovers most of the lost throughput." Decision and setting first; machinery second.
- Stating a result. Before: "Proposition 3 establishes monotonicity of the value function in the lead-time parameter." After: "Proposition 3 says the planner should raise safety stock as supplier lead-time variability grows — never lower it — which rules out a heuristic common in practice." Say what the structure buys the operator.
- Reporting magnitude. Translate improvements into units an operations manager tracks: "cuts expected boarding time by roughly a quarter at the busiest shift" clears the practice gate; a bare percentage cost reduction does not say for whom or where.
- Hedging. Replace "may potentially offer insights for practitioners" with the boundary condition itself: "the pooling benefit holds when capacity is the binding constraint and vanishes when servers are amply staffed."
Checklist
Style execution pass for Production and Operations Management
Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the operational decision, the performance metric, and the implementable lever; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: POM reviewers who want operational insight tied to production, service, supply-chain, or platform decisions.
- Do the pass: Rewrite the first two pages so each paragraph starts from the venue-level claim, not from chronology or method inventory; preserve exact source-map limits and move technical overflow to appendix or supplement.
- Return a ledger: give
claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
- Sibling guard: compare against Management Science for broader OR/MS theory, Operations Research for method-first optimization, MSOM for manufacturing/service operations depth; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
- Stop condition: do not give submission-ready advice until the pack's
resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for volatile rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.
Output format
【POM fit sentence】one sentence (problem + insight + practice)
【Main readability issue】<problem>
【Theory-practice balance】theory-heavy / practice-heavy / balanced
【Format flags】abstract words / title length / citation style / page count
【e-companion move】content to relocate
【Next step】pom-submission
