Where Do Operations
PhDs Land?^*

Faculty directory

OM List — all faculty: names, source-listed affiliation, role, status and research areas. Snapshot: 16 October 2026.

Doctoral education

OM List — PhD graduates by year: PhD institution and year, matched by the source profile link. OM List methodology and limitations.

First placements

University placement reports and dated CVs establish initial employers. Direct evidence links, review dates and short explanations accompany each published placement. Postdoctoral appointments count as first jobs when they precede faculty roles.

Audit and corrections

Import provenance and reconciliation · Faculty dataset · Placement dataset · Research ledger · Institution database · Employer database · Institution locations · Employer locations · Universities database · University locations · Reviewed location corrections · Merged organisation database · Faculty rosters from the directory's faculty pages. Send corrections or source suggestions to kostas.stouras@ucd.ie.

Collection

People come from the OM List faculty directory snapshot of 16 October 2026 (all 2,149 profiles, including retired, deceased and industry entries), with doctorate institution and year joined from the OM List PhD-by-year table by exact profile link. First jobs are then researched one person at a time from dated CVs, official placement reports, appointment announcements and employer biographies. Search results are only leads; a page has to be opened and read before anything is recorded. The directory focuses on business schools and excludes Industrial Engineering departments, so it is a sample of people who became faculty, not a census of graduates. A second source of people comes from the universities database: the faculty pages it links are read, the people listed there are matched to OM List, and the rest were reviewed one by one on 16 October 2026 (a reviewer opened each person's own page and recorded the outcome, the title and area shown and the doctorate only when a page states it; their first jobs are not researched yet). See the import provenance.

Structuring

Each person has a stable identifier that survives corrections. faculty.json preserves the import as received; placements.json holds verified first jobs with employer, role, start year, type, evidence link, paraphrased evidence and review date; research-status.json records one research disposition per person, including the sources consulted when a case stays unresolved. Derived databases are regenerated from these files, never edited: institutions.json (one row per PhD institution), employers.json (one row per first employer), universities.json (the Operations Academia directory of universities with operations departments), entities.json (the two databases and the program register merged into one record per organisation, keyed by Wikidata item where known, with every name from either source kept as an alias and nothing inferred across sources), the location files and a relational SQLite export built by scripts/build-research-database.py on the published schema. Every record in every file carries addedAt and updatedAt: the date and time (UTC) it was first published and last changed, kept in record-dates.json and included in the CSV download.

Validation

Research contributors write separate proposal files; one integrator reviews conflicts and merges by stable identifier, so a newer review can correct an older one but nothing is overwritten silently. The merge refuses records without a substantive reason, opened sources, an evidence link or a valid job type, and flags undocumented changes to a degree year or institution. Every deployment re-runs the checks: dataset identity, ledger coverage of every person exactly once, agreement between each published first job and its review record, and the relational schema tests. Corrections keep the original imported value next to the verified one, with the reason.

Publication

A push to the public repository validates and publishes this page and the data files; the Git history is the change log and the citation names the version date. Nothing is scheduled: updates happen when reviewed work is integrated. Download the current selection as CSV from the explorer, inspect any source directly, or report a correction or removal request (do not include private information in a public issue).

Classification

The first job is the first new appointment after the doctorate. A postdoc before a faculty job is the first job; a job that began well before the degree and simply continued is not, so the next new job counts; a post-doctoral appointment that starts in the final months before formal conferral counts, with the overlap noted; an announcement written before the degree establishes nothing. Types are tenure track, postdoc, other academic, industry, government, non-profit, or "type not reported" when a source names the employer but not the kind of appointment (a university name alone does not make a job tenure track). Start years are recorded only when documented, never copied from the cohort year. Full rules: RESEARCH-DESIGN.md.

Data availability

Counts load with the data.

Not yet collected: a graduate census by program and year, doctoral advisors, publications through the PhD year, and later career moves including academia-to-industry transitions. Their schema exists; populated datasets do not. Map locations and countries are name matches to Wikidata items, kept with their identifiers so a wrong match can be corrected.