TBME is the fourth most cited biomedical engineering journal, ... ing or for publication; both seek new means to differentiate ... mathematical development.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, VOL. 58, NO. 4, APRIL 2011
843
Editorial Our Response to Growth Emphasizing Impact, Novelty, and Validation I. GROWTH AND OUR RESPONSE UBMISSIONS to IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING (TBME) are rapidly improving in quality and in number. The 1219 submissions in 2010 represent an 18% increase from last year’s 1030, nearly double the 662 submitted in 2005. We have responded by more than doubling our efforts at providing the highest quality and timely reviews, doubling the number of our already excellent Associate Editors, expanding the number of articles published, and significantly raising the standards for publication to bring the best articles to our readers. Under the leadership of Senior Editor A. Dhawan, we have also introduced Special Letters Issues on Emerging Technology to provide our readers with late-breaking, high-impact reports on critical topics. TBME has reduced its time to first decision from over 100 days to under 45 days in the last five years, and promises to reduce it further. We have also reduced average “sub to (print) pub” time from over 400 days to under 300 and “sub to epub” time to 143 days, a third of which time is spent by authors revising their manuscripts. These steps have been accomplished without sacrificing the quality of the reviews, which remain among the highest in the field.
S
III. INNOVATION
II. IMPACT: IMMEDIATE AND LASTING TBME, the first established general biomedical engineering journal, has had and continues to have tremendous worldwide impact on the field of biomedical engineering. TBME is the fourth most cited biomedical engineering journal, and has ranked no lower than seventh in ISI statistics since 1998. The total number of citations per year is increasing steadily, having doubled in the last six years. The IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY SOCIETY (EMBS) Publications Committee has recommended that all of its journals place added emphasis on impact as a criterion for acceptance of a manuscript. Accordingly, our review forms now explicitly ask reviewers to rate the impact of a manuscript, and our Associate Editors are asked to report the impact of the article as informed by the opinions of the reviewers. While this is an important change in our reviewing process, it is one of emphasis and not a fundamental change. Our discussions on the importance of an article’s impact mirror several developments in the world of science. First, the new National Institutes of Health reviewing guidelines put new emphasis on the impact of a research proposal, and our emDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/TBME.2011.2114150
phasis parallels this. TBME, like NIH, faces constantly increasing numbers of submissions and limited resources for funding or for publication; both seek new means to differentiate the highest quality submissions from the weaker ones and find that impact is a critical element in both funding and publishing decisions. Second, the headline importance of Impact Factor in a journal’s ranking is inescapable. Inescapable also are complaints that subservience to Impact Factor leads to publishing flashy, trendy, but not necessarily deep articles. TBME’s Impact Factor is good, especially for a comprehensive biomedical engineering journal and considerably better when computed over five years. Outstanding is its Citation Half-Life at nearly nine years, among the best of all scientific journals. We believe TBME’s real impact is better reflected in total citations per year, ranking TBME fourth. Accordingly, TBME’s emphasis on impact is both short and long term. Reviewers are instructed to give their opinion based not only of the immediate impact of a manuscript, but also on its impact when viewed perhaps ten years later as the foundation for the next generation of research.
Our review criteria have always emphasized novelty and innovation. We have taken steps to make reviewers and editors aware that they must explicitly include innovation as a criterion for the evaluation of any manuscript. Of course, both our unsolicited Letters and Special Letters Issues on Emerging Technology are aimed at highly innovative, late-breaking, high-impact reports. IV. VALIDATION Since I began my first term in January 2007, I have continued the policy of my predecessor, Dr. Principe, which emphasizes validation as a very important criterion for TBME articles. The idea is that a paper must be either rigorous in performance evaluation (most papers) or exceptionally novel (a few papers), in which case demonstration of the idea suffices. Most papers should have demonstrable utility (or significant potential) for solving a biomedical problem. Validation is a critical component of most papers, using experimental or clinical data in most cases, or well-established databases or models where appropriate. The degree of validation needed varies by topic, with greater validation for relatively mature areas, such as ECG or EEG signal processing.
0018-9294/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE
844
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, VOL. 58, NO. 4, APRIL 2011
V. MAJOR REVISION VERSUS REJECT WITH ENCOURAGEMENT TO RESUBMIT An increasing number of journals have altered their decision processes replacing decisions of “major revision” with decisions of “reject with encouragement to resubmit.” TBME has for some time used “reject/encourage” for cases, where the revision would likely require more than our 45-day maximum due to new experiments, simulations, or substantially reworking a mathematical development. Currently, a significant fraction of the manuscripts judged “major revision” require extensions of the deadline, indicating that the first submission was not nearly as complete as the authors had originally thought. The EMBS Publications Committee has decided that its journals should strongly encourage a similar policy, where major
and minor revision decisions are reserved for strong articles, where the rewriting clearly fits within our revision time policy; otherwise, we are to reject with or without encouragement to resubmit. It is anticipated that this will accomplish three goals: 1) raising the standards for acceptance; 2) raising the quality of first submissions; and 3) streamlining the review process as we find that the timeliness of reviews strongly correlates with the quality of manuscripts. TBME policy will be to encourage its Associate Editors to adapt to this new policy, but to do so with sensitivity and judgment, phasing in the policy over the next year.
BRUCE C. WHEELER, Editor-in-Chief
