Farewell Editorial - IEEE Xplore

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 62, NO. 4, MAY 2013

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Farewell Editorial

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Y TERM as the Editor of the IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON V EHICULAR T ECHNOLOGY (TVT) ended on March 31, 2013. It is a great honor for me to have led the TVT editorial board since January 2007. I have had a wonderful experience in serving the vehicular technology community in this capacity. TVT has experienced exceptionally strong growth and significant performance improvement in various measures. First, the number of paper submissions is at all-time high and increased to 1919 manuscripts in 2012 from 739 in 2006, as illustrated in Fig. 1. With an objective of improving the quality of TVT publications, the paper acceptance rate has been decreased from 38% for papers submitted in 2006 to 27% for papers submitted in 2011, as shown in Fig. 2. To clear the publication backlog in printed issues and to accommodate the increasing number of submissions, the journal has been publishing nine issues annually since 2009 (from bimonthly issues), and the number of published pages has significantly increased since 2007, as shown in Figs. 3 and 4. Furthermore, TVT has been publishing an accepted paper on IEEE Xplore before the paper actually appears in a printed issue, in the category of Forthcoming Papers, which greatly reduces the time duration from submission to e-publication, as illustrated in Fig. 5. As a result, there has been no publication backlog in recent years. The latest data in terms of average submission-to-publication duration place TVT in the top 38 among the 98 IEEE journals in the same category. Our editorial board strives to publish research papers with significant technical novelty and contributions in a timely manner. Many volunteers have contributed to the editorial process, including all the associate editors, guest editors, and reviewers. Together, we have significantly reduced the duration of the editorial-process. By January 2012, we completed the editorial process for all submissions made by the end of 2011 and earlier. Table I shows some of the statistics of our editorial process. As a result, the TVT impact factor has been steadily increasing since 2004, as shown in Table II. According to the Journal Citation Reports by Thomson Reuters, TVT is currently ranked 16th among the 79 journals in Telecommunications, sixth among the 28 journals in Transportation Science and Technology, and 53rd among the 245 journals in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. TVT has been an important venue for researchers and engineers in both academia and industry to publish research results and technical information on advances in the three TVT strategic areas, i.e., mobile communications and networks, transportation systems, and vehicular electronics. One indication is the number of TVT paper downloads at IEEE Xplore. As shown in Table III, TVT currently stands 20th among 311 IEEE periodicals.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVT.2013.2257334

Fig. 1. Number of paper submissions.

Fig. 2. year.

Paper acceptance rate in percentage according to the paper submission

Fig. 3. Number of publication pages.

TVT publishes Special Sections as part of a proactive strategy to maximize the support for emerging research areas in vehicular technology and to reach out to scholars who may not 0018-9545/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 62, NO. 4, MAY 2013

TABLE III IEEE X PLORE D OWNLOAD N UMBER OF A LL TVT P UBLICATIONS AND TVT R ANK A MONG A LL IEEE P ERIODICALS

Fig. 4. Number of published papers.

Fig. 5. Average time duration from submission to e-publication (in months) according to the paper publication year. The 2012 data are based on papers published in the first three quarters. TABLE I AVERAGE D URATIONS ( IN M ONTHS ) OF THE TVT E DITORIAL P ROCESS ACCORDING TO THE PAPER S UBMISSION Y EAR

TABLE II TVT I MPACT FACTOR

have found the appropriate forum for their research. Since 2007, 11 special sections have been published, two more are on the queue to appear, and three new special sections are accepting

submissions in the areas of transportation and vehicular electronics, as well as on hot topics in mobile communications and networks. The Special Sections have been well received by the Vehicular Technology community, with a large number of submissions and a large number of citations. I am deeply indebted to all the TVT associate editors and guest editors for the special sections for their professional integrity, technical competence, and dedication to the editorial process, which uphold the high quality of TVT. I would like to thank all of our authors for choosing TVT as their journal of choice for their cutting-edge research results and for sharing of information on advances in state-of-the-art vehicular technology. I would like to thank all the reviewers for their diligent efforts to ensure the timeliness of the review process. I would also like to thank the TVT readers for their continued support. Your reading and citing TVT papers enhance the impact of journal. I must voice my deep appreciation to the former IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) Vice President (VP) for Publications, J. R. Cruz, for his leadership, valuable insights, and encouragement for all my initiatives. My special thanks go to the VTS Board of Governors, particularly to the current VP for Publications, J. Irvine, for his strong support during my tenure as the TVT Editor. I am thankful to all the TVT administrators (W. Song, H. T. Cheng, H. Liang, M. Ismail, A. Abdrabou, and L. Green) and the excellent IEEE Staff team, particularly C. Perry and S. Parikh, for all their help. Finally, it is my great pleasure to introduce and welcome the next TVT Editor, Yuguang (Michael) Fang, from the University of Florida. He has made significant research contributions to wireless networks and mobile computing systems. With his wealth of experience as a journal editor, he will bring strong leadership and commitment to TVT. I have no doubt that he will bring TVT to new heights. I wish him the best!

W EIHUA Z HUANG, Outgoing Editor University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada

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Weihua Zhuang (F’08) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada, all in electrical engineering. Since October 1993, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, where she is a Professor and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in wireless communication networks. She coauthored the textbook Wireless Communications and Networking, published by Prentice-Hall in 2003, which was translated into Chinese and published by the Publishing House of Electronics Industry of China in 2004. Her current research focuses on resource allocation and quality-of-service provisioning in wireless networks. Dr. Zhuang co-received the Best Paper Awards from IEEE Globecom in 2012, the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) in 2007 and 2012, the IEEE Multimedia Communications Technical Committee in 2011, the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference in Fall 2010, the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference in 2007 and 2010, and the International Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security, and Robustness (QShine) in 2007 and 2008. Since 2005, she has received the Outstanding Performance Award from the University of Waterloo four times, as well as the Premier’s Research Excellence Award in 2001 from the Province of Ontario Government, Canada. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Engineering Institute of Canada, an elected Member (2012–2014) of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer (2008–2011). She was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON V EHICULAR T ECHNOLOGY from 2007 to 2013 and an Editor of the IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON W IRELESS C OMMUNICATIONS from 2005 to 2009. She was the Technical Program Committee (TPC) Cochair of the Wireless Networks Symposium of IEEE Globecom in 2008 and the TPC Symposia Chair of IEEE Globecom in 2011. She will be the TPC Co-chair for the Mobile and Wireless Networking Symposium of the IEEE ICC in 2014.