Q5 (Assignment Problem)

Academic journals are ranked by their impact and quality and given grades 1 to 4*, with the 4* ranked journals as the highest. These journal rankings are intended to reflect the place of the journal within its field, the relative difficulty of being published in that journal, and the prestige associated with it. Within the universities, academics want always to publish in the highest ranked journals since it not only brings prestige to the university, but also it provides the authors progression and promotion to higher post like reader and professor. A team of academics in a Russell Group university wanted to publish a paper in a 4* and the journal Editor allocates points to various sections of the paper as follows;

Section	Points Allocated
Introduction	15
Literature Review	20
Methodology	20
Data Analysis	15
Discussions & Conclusion	20
Presentation & Structure	10
Total	100

The Editor will only consider publishing any paper if it scores at least 85 points, otherwise it is rejected. The university currently has 6 academics working on a paper. Below is a table showing average points receives in previous paper submissions by 6 authors (academics).

	John	Bobby	Sophie	Dinah	Edith	Felicia
Introduction	2	17	10	12	5	8
Literature Review	13	7	4	15	11	6
Methodology	9	13	8	16	13	7
Data Analysis	9	12	14	13	14	8
Discussions & Conclusion	7	10	16	15	10	6
Presentation & Structure	8	9	7	5	8	6

It is a requirement that all contributing authors of a submitted manuscript should contribute to only one section of the paper. In previous submission to the journal, they were unable to get enough points, so their paper was rejected.

The university is now working on submitting a new paper and the authors have decided that two colleagues are not very strong on the average to contributing to drafting a paper. So they decided to recruit another academic (Charles) into the team so as to increase their chances of acceptance. The table below shows Charles previous average points scores for the sections

Section	Points
Introduction	13
Literature Review	17
Methodology	14
Data Analysis	12
Discussions & Conclusion	15
Presentation & Structure	7

1. Who are these two colleagues who are not very strong on the average to contributing to the paper, and which of them should be removed out of the team?
2. What is now the points that could be obtained with this new recruit?
3. What are now the assignments?
4. Will the paper be accepted or not?