New Honor, New Initiatives, and New Impact to Come

By Li Deng, Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

First, I would like to share some good news and a new honor with all of you, our IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) readers. Based on the recent Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Report (JCR) released in late June 2011, for the second year in a row, SPM has ranked number one among all 247 publications within the electrical and electronics engineering category worldwide and first among all 127 IEEE publications. For more details, see the feature article written by our SPS Vice President-Publications, Prof. Ali Sayed, in the August issue of our eNewsletter.

Each year, the JCR from Thomson-Reuters ISI examines the impact of scientific journals by determining how often the articles are cited by the latest research. The resulting Science Citation Index provides researchers, administrators, faculty, and students with quick, powerful access to the bibliographic and citation information they need to find relevant, comprehensive research data. Its main purpose is to enable the users to overcome information overload and to focus on essential data and published literature from over 3,700 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals across over 100 disciplines. In the latest ISI report, SPM’s impact factor jumps to 5.86. This is a significant improvement over the previous year when SPM had an impact factor of 4.91, which was also the top ranking score at that time.

The societal impact of signal processing, as reflected by the consistent top ranking, and its extraordinary variety of applications constitute the underlying basis for our Magazine’s success. The influence of SPM and IEEE is far reaching. IEEE’s scientific information drives technology development. IEEE’s scientific and technical articles are cited 3 times more often than any other scholarly or commercial publisher.

I also would like to take this opportunity to share with you some new initiatives from our Magazine, which promise to expand our impact further and in a more global scale.  As many of you know, the first edition of reprint SPM articles with translations from the original English to Chinese was created in September 2010.  Since then, we have collected much positive feedback from our Asian readers, together with numerous suggestions for improvement. We have been actively working on the second edition for several months, making full use of the valuable feedback we have collected.  The new edition, which includes side-by-side English-Chinese parallel texts and commonly used technical terminologies, is scheduled to be mailed with IEEE Spectrum to all IEEE members in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore in August 2011. By the time this editorial is being read, our Asian colleagues will have received the new Chinese reprint edition. Simultaneously, we are also in the process of producing the first edition of reprint SPM articles with translations from the original English to Brazilian Portuguese. Like China, Brazil is another prominent emerging region full of signal processing engineers, professionals, and students. Just like our colleagues in Asia, those in Brazil have also expressed a strong interest in our translation effort. During the many global trips made by myself as well as by our editorial team members, we have learned of the intense desire of our nonnative English readers in two rather distinct aspects: 1) using their native languages to understand the technical content of our SPM articles better; and 2) improving their technical English writing skills, which can be handily aided by parallel versions of English and their native language.

Finally, beginning with this issue, our SPM columns section institutes a special initiative to help our readers sort through all the new ideas and hot topics in the signal processing field (even before some of them become fads). We would like to introduce our readers to a set of "Trends" articles in this and some ensuing issues. These articles will appear in the "In The Spotlight" column. Our column editors have been working closely with the Technical Chairs of ICASSP 2011 and with the authors to bring such articles into your hands. The origin of these articles is as follows. As many of the senior signal processing researchers may remember, some years ago our ICASSP had Expert Summary sessions toward the end of the conference. (I happened to be an expert summary speaker at ICASSP 1999. I remember staying up every night during ICASSP 1999 week until 3 a.m. to summarize the conversations with the authors of that day’s papers, as part of preparation for the summary talk at the final Expert Summary session.) Unfortunately, this ICASSP tradition died soon after, likely due to the extraordinary efforts required to create such sessions. Luckily, our heroic program committee of ICASSP 2011 in Prague decided to revive the tradition of Expert Summary sessions, which they now call “Trends” Expert Overview sessions. These sessions have a somewhat different format from their older counterparts, but they consist essentially of the same summary talks authored by the Society’s Technical Committees and presented by their selected keynote “experts”. In this issue, there are four Trends articles written by keynote experts from four separate Technical Committees. The remaining Technical Committees will have their Trends articles published in the November 2011 or January 2012 issues of the magazine.

Importantly, and different from 12 years ago, we now have new technology that makes the presentation of these Trends articles more effective than ever before. As introduced in two recent editorials (March and July 2011), our SPM is pioneering the use of Tagtechnology to conveniently connect the printed material to its supplementary online multimedia content. For our four Trends articles in this issue, we collected supplementary material consisting of authors’ video recordings and their slides. For you as readers to access the videos or slides, you can simply use your smartphone to scan the embedded Tag. Please try scanning the Tags labeled "Video" and "Slides" and let us know your experience. You can use your imagination to think about other potentially more useful supplementary online material, such as animated figures and notes explaining the derivation of difficult equations in the printed article, for all sorts of tutorial articles in our magazine. Let us know your ideas, and we may be able to implement them.

We wish to thank all of our global readers. You are our customers, and we are here to serve you.

Related reference:

Journal Citation Reports, Science Edition 2010: Electrical & Electronics Engineering Category, Ranked by Impact Factor.