Editorial

Abstract

2016 was another good year for Electronics Letters, with continued interest and support from the international research community that it was designed to serve. We received in excess of 4,000 submissions and published a total of 1062 Letters on subjects such as LEDs to treat neurological disease, quantum networks, holographic data storage, medical radar, record-breaking terahertz communications, and blue laser diodes. Don't forget that we select a few Letters from each issue to highlight in feature articles. These give the authors a chance to talk in further detail about the real-world applications of their research and expand on how they see the field moving forward. You can find these unique articles at the front of each issue in print and online, and you can get alerts through our Twitter account @eleclett. Chris Toumazou Ian White We were very pleased to award The IET Premium Award for the Best Paper in Electronics Letters this year to Z. Gao, L. Dai, and Z. Wang from Tsinghua University, People's Republic of China, for their Letter, ‘Structured compressive sensing based superimposed pilot design in downlink large-scale MIMO system,’ Electronics Letters, 2014, 50, (12), pp. 896–898. This Letter presents a new technique for addressing one of the challenges of future 5G wireless communication by significantly reducing the pilot overhead of large-scale MIMO channels and increasing spectrum efficiency. Compressive sensing is now emerging as a dominant technique for communication technology, and the publication of such significant work goes to show that Electronics Letters is at the forefront of research, driving technology forward. This drive has always been the purpose of Electronics Letters and, as electrical and electronic engineering becomes more and more interdisciplinary, the scope of the journal offers a natural home for cutting edge research. We congratulate the authors, and invite you all to read their Letter which is free to view until August 2017 at www.ietdl.org/EL. This year we have added some new features that allow even faster and greater exposure of the latest developments published in the journal. Publication on acceptance means that all papers are now published with a DOI as soon as they are accepted, so that they can be shared and cited right away. Authors are also given a unique URL for their published work, and they can share this with their colleagues, allowing free access for six months. We strongly encourage authors to take advantage of this to increase the exposure of their work to the international community. As well as being supported by its contributors, Electronics Letters continues to be supported by its readers, as can be seen in the nearly 800,000 downloads in 2015 on the IET Digital Library and IEEE Xplore. We are continually working to ensure that the journal remains relevant, and we have further expanded the editorial board to better support new and developing areas. We now have over 150 subject editors and associate editors whose collective expertise spans the full spectrum of electrical engineering, and reflects the interdisciplinary and international nature of the field, as well as the breadth and depth of the journal itself. We welcome those newly appointed to the board, and wish to thank all board members for their hard work in maintaining the high standards for which the journal is known. The editorial and production team at the IET have been indispensable in their support of the journal and the peer-review process. The rigour of the process is something we are very proud of and, once again, we extend our gratitude to the thousands of peer-reviewers for their hard work. We very much appreciate the time that they have taken from their busy schedules to ensure that the quality of research published in Electronics Letters is upheld. If you do not currently review for Electronics Letters, and would like to support the community and the journal in this way, please let us know at eletters@theiet.org.