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The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of knowledge management (KM) in an Iranian Research Organisation in order to identify and classify the most relevant KM critical success factors.

Based on extensive review of KM literature, broad ranges of general KM critical success factors are identified. Then, through field studies and employing factor analysis techniques and Friedman test, the degree of the relevance of each particular KM critical success factors is determined. The research procedure finally led to the identification of KM critical success factors prevailing in the research organization.

Eight distinct KM factors including 22 different elements are found to be relevant and critical in the course of KM implementation in the research organization. These factors are “The presence of appropriate organizational culture”, “The existing system for knowledge documentation, recording and registration”, “The presence of motivational system for workforces”, “Appropriate management and planning for KM realization”, “The existing hardware and software infrastructures and standard executive processes in KM field”, “The presence of specialized teams including expert and skillful personnel”, “The existing appropriate organizational architecture of KM and evaluation system for realization of KM” and “The existing systematic relationship with beneficiaries of the research organization”.

The paper should be of value to researchers of KM in general, and to implementers of KM programs. It presents a range of issues critical to the adoption of KM initiatives.

This paper aims to focus on a medical goods distribution problem and pharmacological waste collection by plug-in hybrid vehicles with some real-world restrictions. In this research, considering alternative energy sources and simultaneous pickup and delivery led to a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions and distribution costs, respectively.

Here, this problem has been modeled as mixed-integer linear programming with the traveling and energy consumption costs objective function. The GAMS was used for model-solving in small-size instances. Because the problem in this research is an NP-hard problem and solving real-size problems in a reasonable time is impossible, in this study, the artificial bee colony algorithm is used.

Then, the algorithm results are compared with a simulated annealing algorithm that recently was proposed in the literature. Finally, the results obtained from the exact solution and metaheuristic algorithms are compared, analyzed and reported. The results showed that the artificial bee colony algorithm has a good performance.

In this paper, medical goods distribution with pharmacological waste collection is studied. The paper was focused on plug-in hybrid vehicles with simultaneous pickup and delivery. The problem was modeled with environmental criteria. The traveling and energy consumption costs are considered as an objective function.

The authors reinforce the existing literature on the effect of overall globalization on institutional quality (IQ), while incorporating the effects of economic, political and social aspects of globalization, human capital, government expenditure and population growth. To this end, the authors estimate panel data models for a sample of 36 member countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) during 1984–2016.

The authors employ the cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lags (CS-ARDL) approach.

The study’s investigation affirms the presence of an inverted U-shaped (nonlinear) relation between overall globalization and IQ indexes for the sample countries, which suggests no additional room for improvement in IQ. It also underpins the existence of an inverted-U-shaped (nonlinear) relation between political globalization and IQ. In contrast, economic and social globalizations have a U-shaped relation with IQ, implying more scope for improvement.

The findings have key policy implications. First, policy makers should consider a long-run approach for improving IQ and globalization over time. Second, quick reforms in the short run may not improve IQ.

The results suggest that policy makers should approach the globalization process from a long-run perspective as well by designing appropriate strategies to provide a continuous but gradual increase in globalization so as to systematically monitor the threshold limits to IQ from improving globalization

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first to empirically investigate the overall role of globalization in promoting IQ under the conditions of short-run heterogeneity and long-run homogeneity. The authors focus on the member countries of the OIC, many of which are ruled by authoritarian regimes and suffer from a poor domestic institutional setting.