Volunteer Power Through Noisy Gradients and Self-Organization: What About Pruning?

In the first issue of 2024, we introduced the new lead editorial team of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM), composed of our four area editors. Their terms started with mine this January, and they oversee the Society e-newsletter and the three main components of our magazine: feature articles, special issues, and columns and forum articles. As a team, we have undertaken a complete revision of the specifications for all article types and the information we provide our authors. We also revised the templates for all article types along with proposals and white papers, and all are included within the IEEE Author Center’s template selector [1].

The specifications for articles are unified across article types. We slightly increased the length and the total number of references and figures for each article type responding to feedback from authors and from our Editorial Board working with the previous Editor-in-Chief, Christian Jutten. Columns and forum articles are now classified as long or short articles depending on their type. For the templates, specifications such as font size and format are consistent across the three types of articles that we publish: feature, special issue, and the columns and forum articles.

While most of the information on the web pages has not changed, it is now significantly shorter and more succinct, primarily in recognition of our ever-shrinking attention span owing to the constant inundation of information. A main goal has been simplification so that key points do come across clearly, such as the fact that SPM does not publish new research articles. This point has been repeated numerous times in the past but, alas, is still the main reason for our rather high number of immediate reject decisions. SPM only publishes tutorial articles, which can be more comprehensive articles as in feature articles or special issue articles that are interrelated tutorials providing a comprehensive coverage of a specific topic of interest to our community. Similarly, columns and forum articles do not report on new research work but focus on a range of topics in signal processing and are divided into categories with different objectives and dynamics. They can be technical or nontechnical as in perspectives articles.