Editorial - Status Report on Your TRANSACTIONS - IEEE Xplore

3862

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 53, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2005

Editorial - Status Report on Your TRANSACTIONS

W

hen I took on the Editorship-in-Chief in the middle of last year, one of the greatest concerns was the backlog of papers. I am very pleased to report that, with this December issue, the backlog of papers has now been eliminated. Positive proof of this success is in my office where I have now recovered the bench space that I had once lost to boxes of papers to be published. The removal of the backlog has been one of a number of improvements that have been made in the past 14 months. These and several other changes have occurred in the period and, therefore, it is timely in this Editorial to give a status report on the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION as seen by the Editor’s office. Backlog of Papers and Number of Pages Published—The elimination of the backlog of papers that has been with us for the past five years or more was made possible by work initiated by my predecessor, Prof. Allen W. Glisson, the AP Society AdCom, and IEEE publications. AdCom strongly supported Allen’s and my endeavours to reduce the backlog and in recent years increased the number of pages published annually by over 50%. From the start of this year, IEEE Publications increased the upper limit of published pages to 20% over the budgeted amount without incurring penalty to the share of revenue received from IEEE publications. Additionally, we were able to take advantage of the June 2005 TAB decision to allow the number of pages to exceed 20% for this year only, which opportunity enabled me to eliminate the backlog faster than I had anticipated. The removal of the backlog means that accepted papers received by the Editorial Office today are now published three months hence. This compares with 2004, where it was common for accepted papers to take over 12 months to appear in print. The backlog was eliminated despite the number of pages published in the past three years increasing by about 30% per annum. In 2005, we published almost 500 papers covering over 4200 journal pages. New Manuscripts Submitted—The number of approved published pages was increased not only to remove the backlog of papers but also to cope with the unprecedented increase in the number of papers submitted. In 2004, there was a 36% increase over 2003 and this year there has been a further increase in excess of 20%. This means in 2005, we expect to receive about 1100 new manuscripts, compared with about 700 in 2003. To help handle this increased workload I have appointed 34 Associate Editors to manage the review of papers on specialized topics. Their names are listed in the inside back cover of every issue. I am extremely grateful to these talented people who give their time and expertise freely for the benefit of the TRANSACTIONS. Delivery of Published Transactions on Time—You will be pleased to hear that the TRANSACTIONS is now published on time, as scheduled in the second week of every calendar month.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2005.861383

The latest issue is available at the same time on the web through IEEE Xplore. Therefore, if, like me, you live outside of continental USA, you can read your latest issue on the web without waiting for your printed copy of the TRANSACTIONS to arrive by snail mail. Time-to-First Decision—Authors want to have their work published as soon as possible and readers want to read the latest research. Therefore, the time interval to publish is an important measure of success for everyone. The major contributor to this interval is the time from submission to first decision and this has been reduced steadily over the past two years. Currently, the average time to first decision is about 84 days, down from about 100 days in 2003, and a decision is made on 80% of new manuscripts within 110 days. Time to Publication—The time to publication continues to reduce. In this issue about 40% of the papers were submitted this year; that is, publication in under 12 months. On average, papers are published within about 13 months of submission. This is about average for an IEEE TRANSACTIONS, but clearly there is room for reduction in the time to publication. Acceptance Rate—The current rate of acceptance is about 50%. The actual figure is hard to calculate because there are usually many papers undergoing major or minor revisions and even some accepted papers never actually appear in print. In this retrospective, it is valuable to review progress against the objectives set out in my first editorial as Editor-in-Chief (September 2004 issue). 1) Improve timeliness of the first decision, and from submission to publication, with a target of achieving 12 months. This is now close to being realized. 2) Have two special issues per year. Two Special Issues have been produced in 2005 and two are underway for 2006. In January 2005 there was a Special Issue on “Artificial Magnetic Conductors, Soft/Hard Surfaces, and other Complex Surfaces” guest edited by P-S. Kildal, A. Kiskh, and S. Maci, and another in August on “Antennas and Propagation Applications” edited by myself. Other Special Issues are planned. These are: February 2006 - “Multifunction and Multifrequency Antennas,” July 2006 - “Wireless Communications,” January 2007 - “Synthesis and Optimization Techniques in Electromagnetics and Antenna System Design,” July 2007 - “Optical and Terahertz Antennas.” Another Special Issue planned for publication in 2007 to honor the late Professor Leo Felsen will be announced shortly. 3) Pursue increased emphasis on engineering applications in antenna systems and propagation. A Special Issue on “Antennas and Propagation Applications” was published in August. This attracted well over 2000 downloads in the month of August, which demonstrates a significant interest in these types of papers. 4) Continue to improve the quality of the TRANSACTIONS. At the end of 2004, TAP had improved its ranking by one position to 11th out of all 118 IEEE journal publications,

0018-926X/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 53, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2005

determined by the number of downloads from IEEE Xplore. As of July 2005, TAP was ranked eighth in terms of usage while the legacy issues (pre-1988), which are currently treated separately in Xplore, were ranked 35th. Further, TAP was ranked in the top 16 of all journals on telecommunications in a recent survey. One slight disappointing note is that although the impact factor (average number of citations per paper in the two succeeding years following publication) of the TRANSACTIONS has risen slightly over recent years it is still just below 1. On the other hand, the longevity of articles in the TRANSACTIONS is in excess of 10 years and it is one of only a handful of journals with this distinction. With IEEE Xplore it is now possible to count the number of downloads for each article published in the TRANSACTIONS. By this means, Editors-in-Chief can track the number of times papers are downloaded over a period of time. For example, in the 14 months from August 2004, the largest number of downloads has been for the following papers listed in descending order: 1) M. A. Jensen and J. W. Wallace, “A review of antennas and propagation for MIMO wireless communications,” vol. 52. no. 11, Nov. 2004, pp. 2810-2824. 2) N. Behdad and K. Sarabandi, “A compact antenna for ultrawide-band applications,” vol. 53, no, 7, July 2005, pp. 2185-2192. 3) K.-L. Lau, P. Li, and K.-M. Luk. “A monopolar patch antenna with very wide impedance bandwidth,” vol. 53, no. 2, February 2005, pp. 655-661. 4) J. Andrieu, S. Nouvet, V. Bertrand, B. Beillard, and B. Jecko, “Transient characterization of a novel ultrawide-band antenna: The scissors antenna,” vol. 53, no. 4, April 2005, pp. 1254-1261. 5) S. I. Latif, L. Shafai, and S. K. Sharma, “Bandwidth enhancement and size reduction of microstrip slot antennas,” vol. 53, no. 4, March 2005, pp. 994-1003. As mentioned previously, papers published in TAP prior to 1988 are counted separately and there are a significant number of downloads of these articles. In fact, the seventh ranked TRANSACTIONS paper in the past 14 months was for R.

3863

O. Schmidt, "Multiple emitter location and signal parameter estimation," Vol. 34, no. 3, March 1986, pp. 276-280. Clearly, the reason for the large number of downloads for all papers listed above is due to the continuing high interest in all types of wireless systems. The meeting of publication deadlines and improvements in the TRANSACTIONS has been made possible by two very special individuals who have toiled long and hard for the TRANSACTIONS and deserve our thanks. These are the IEEE Associate Editor, Dawn L. Menendez, and the TAP Editorial Assistant, Dallas Rolph. Both have managed to keep publication schedules despite the increased number of papers and pages published. Dallas also handles most of the author requests which currently average around 30 e-mails per day. Finally, I indicate what is in store over the next 12 months. I am planning further administrative improvements to simplify the workflow in the Editorial Office. This will be assisted by the move to a new version of the manuscript management software, Manuscript Central. The old version has served us very well and reliably and, without it, management of the large number of papers we now receive would have been extremely difficult. To allay any fears about the next version, I can say it is well tried by other IEEE TRANSACTIONS and has many improved features. One of these features is the ability to prepare issues electronically. Additionally, I plan to follow up the success of the Special Issue on Antennas and Propagation Applications by commissioning a series of papers on current applications. Papers will also be commissioned on other topics of special interest to ensure the TRANSACTIONS is covering not only current interests but also emerging areas relevant to antennas and propagation. Thank you for your support so far and I look forward to continuing to serve you as Editor-in-Chief.

TREVOR S. BIRD, Editor-in-Chief CSIRO ICT Centre P.O. Box 76 Epping, NSW 1710 Australia

Trevor S. Bird (S’71–M’76–SM’85–F’97) received the B.App.Sc., M.App.Sc., and the Ph.D. degrees from the University of Melbourne, Melbourne Australia, in 1971, 1973, and 1977, respectively. From 1976 to 1978, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queen Mary College, University of London, London, U.K., followed by five years as a Lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering, James Cook University, North Queensland, Australia. During 1982 and 1983, he was a Consultant at Plessey Radar, U.K., and in December 1983 he joined CSIRO, Sydney, Australia. He has held several positions with CSIRO and is currently Chief Research Scientist and Research Leader of the Electromagnetics and Antennas Group, CSIRO ICT Centre. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He has published widely in the area of antennas, waveguides, electromagnetics, and satellite communication antennas, and holds eight patents.

3864

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 53, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2005

Dr. Bird is Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological and Engineering Sciences, the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), London, U.K., and Engineers Australia. In 1988, 1992, 1995, and 1996 he received the John Madsen Medal of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, for the best paper published annually in the Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Australia, and in 2001 he was co-recipient of the H.A. Wheeler Applications Prize Paper Award of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. He was awarded a CSIRO Medal in 1990 for the development of an Optus-B satellite spot beam antenna and again in 1998 for the multibeam antenna feed system for the Parkes radio telescope. He received an IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000 for Outstanding Contributions to the IEEE New South Wales Section. Engineering projects that he played a major role in were given awards by the Society of Satellite Professionals International (New York) in 2004, The Institution of Engineers, Australia, in 2001, and the Communications Research Laboratory, Japan, in 2000. In 2003, he was awarded a Centenary Medal for service to Australian society in telecommunications and also named Professional Engineer of the Year by the Sydney Division of The Institution of Engineers Australia. In 2004, he was listed in the Top 100 Australia’s Most Influential Engineers by Engineers Australia. He was a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society from 1997 to 1999, Chair of the New South Wales joint AP/MTT Chapter from 1995 to 1998, and again in 2003, Chairman of the 2000 Asia Pacific Microwave Conference, Vice-chair and Chair of the New South Wales Section in 1999 to 2000 and 2001 to 2002, respectively, and Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION from 2001 to 2004. He was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION commencing in August 2004. He has been a Member of the technical committee of numerous conferences including JINA, ICAP, AP2000, and the URSI Electromagnetic Theory Symposium. Currently, he is a Member of Adcom of the Antennas and Propagation Society, and the Editorial Board of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES.