State of the Journal Editorial

Abstract

I would like to take this opportunity to bring our readership up to date on the state of the journal. My yearly editorial usually appears in January of each year, but I've delayed it a month so that I can announce our largest cohort yet of new associate editors. By the time this editorial appears, I will have started my fourth year in the role and first of my two-year reappointment. It's once again been a very good year, with our impact factor leaping from 9.455 (2017) to 17.30 (2018), establishing IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence as the top-ranked journal in all of computer science. Moreover, our submissions are up from last year; as of 13 Nov 2019, we had 1,101 submissions, compared to 992 as of Nov 13, 2018. For papers accepted in 2018, the average time from submission to first decision is 3.8 months, while the average time from submission to publication on Xplore is 10.8 months. While both metrics reflect an improvement over last year, I'm still short of my target. As I mentioned last year, with the increasing emphasis that our community places on conference papers, I'd ideally like to get the time from submission to online publication down to 6-7 months, which is comparable to the time from conference paper submission to conference paper presentation. Over the past two years, a big part of my strategy to reduce time to acceptance and publication is to appoint more Associate Editors (AEs), which will reduce the workload per AE, hopefully allowing our AEs to focus their energy on fewer papers and shepherd them more efficiently. I’m pleased to announce a new cohort of 39 Associate Editors that have joined since January, 2019: Amr Ahmed, Xiang Bai, Dima Damen, Kosta Derpanis, Giovanni Farinella, Ryan Farrell, Yasu Furukawa, Jim Glass, Andras Gyorgy, Tim Hospedales, Brian Kingsbury, Ajay Kumar, Simon Lacoste-Julien, Lihong Li, Ce Liu, Tie-Yan Liu, Wei Liu, Chen Change Loy, Michael Maire, Deyu Meng, Vlad Morariu, Cheng Soon Ong, John Paisley, Thomas Pock, Liva Ralaivola, Xiaofen Ren, Irina Rish, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, Yaser Sheikh, Suvrit Sra, Ping Tan, Christian Theobalt, Radu Timofte, Lorenzo Torresani, Chong Wang, Jue Wang, Richard Wildes, Christian Wolf, and Lei Zhang. Professional biographies are presented for these individuals.