IEEE Signal Processing Magazine leads all EE Journals in Impact Factor - IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing ranks fifth among all EE Journals in Total Citations

By Ali H. Sayed, Vice-President Publications

The Publications Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society oversees the health and quality of our journals and enforces the highest scholarly and ethical standards in promoting and advancing the science that is generated by our authors.

Our journals are led by able Editors-in-Chief and are assisted by highly qualified editorial boards and editorial staff. All those involved in the publications process are constantly reminded that our journals are selective and they should bring forth to our readers works that are at the forefront of the information and signal processing sciences.

Our efforts have been directed towards enforcing higher publication standards and achieving a more efficient turn-around review time. Many of our authors should have already noticed the improved review cycle. At the same time, our editors and their boards are constantly reminded of the need to treat authors with utmost consideration and respect. The publications exercise is not aimed at only publishing articles that survive the review process. Even articles that are left behind deserve to receive thoughtful feedback that would assist their authors in improving their submissions.

I am glad to report that our efforts towards enhanced quality and performance are paying off, as evidenced by various metrics. For most of our publications, the time from submission to e-publication in 2010 has decreased on average by 19% relative to 2009. Furthermore, in June 2011, Thomson Reuters released its 2010 Journal Citation Report, which is generally accepted as the World’s most influential source of information about highly-cited, peer reviewed publications. Several of our Society journals continue to stand out in terms of their impact factors and citation performance.

The 2010 results show that our own IEEE Signal Processing Magazine continues to rank first in terms of its impact factor among all publications in the Electrical Engineering field (247 of them) for the second year in a row (2009 and 2010). The magazine impact factor jumped from 3.76 in 2008 (when it was ranked ninth) to 4.91 in 2009 (when it moved to first place) to 5.86 in 2010 (where it continues to rank first). This is an impressive accomplishment and a reflection of the hard work of the entire magazine’s editorial team and of the various initiatives that we have undertaken to strengthen the outreach of the magazine: such as the inclusion of interesting technological articles, the publication of a digital edition that is now shared with all our members via email, the inclusion of video tags in our articles, the introduction of Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese translations of selected articles, and the ongoing process of creating iPad versions of our articles for the readers.

The IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing is also showing an impressive improvement in its standing. Again, for the second year in a row, the Transactions ranks fifth among all EE publications in terms of the total number of citations received (16,576), and it stands only one position behind the IEEE Proceedings which ranked fourth and received 16,971 total citations. The impact factor of the Transactions has also increased to 2.63 in 2010 and the journal now ranks 17^th among all EE journals (247 of them); an impressive rise from the 35^th and 39^th places in 2009 and 2008, respectively. Even our newest publication, the IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing, is starting to make its mark. The impact factor of the journal has essentially doubled from 1.2 in 2009 to about 2.6 in 2010.

It is understandable that some journals will perform better than others given the size of their author pool, the number of submissions received, the breadth of their coverage areas, and their longer history since inception. Nevertheless, we always encourage our journals to keep pushing forward to increase their competitiveness and to continue to lead in their fields.

We would like to thank our staff and volunteers for their dedicated work on behalf of our publications, and particularly our reviewers, associate editors, and editors-in-chief.