Incoming Editorial - IEEE Xplore

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—I: REGULAR PAPERS, VOL. 55, NO. 2, MARCH 2008

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Incoming Editorial

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EAR TCAS-I Reader, It is indeed a true honor and a privilege to start my term of duty as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—I: REGULAR PAPERS (TCAS-I). Since I initiated my career as a scientist working on nonlinear circuits and systems, I have always considered TCAS-I as the most highly reputed journal for engineers and researchers in the areas of modeling, design, analysis, synthesis, implementation, and testing of circuits and systems. TCAS-I has inherited a long and prestigious tradition dating back to 1963 when the journal was named the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUIT THEORY. My highest priority and challenge for the next two years will be to further enhance the impact and recognition that the journal has gained internationally since its first appearance. To achieve this goal, there are a few challenges that must still be addressed, which are briefly described in the following. With respect to this, I take advantage of the fact that this Editorial could not appear in the January issue of TCAS-I (since it was a Joint Special Issue with the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL) to report also a few of the initial steps which have been taken. A. Reduction of the Time Between Manuscript Submission and Publication Timely publication has recently become an issue for the journal. In fact, despite the fact that, in the past two years, the average first review time was at a reasonable value—being approximately 174 days— the time from submission to publication still remains too high: according to the data shown in the five-year periodical report presented to the IEEE Technical Activities Board at the end of November 2007, the average number of months from authors’ submission to publication date in the period 2006–2007 was 18.6. The main reason for this major bottleneck is rooted in the large backlog that TCAS-I has accumulated over the past few years, in part, due to the reorganization which took place at the beginning of 2004 and which also involved the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS (TCAS-II). At the time of writing this Editorial, we have enough papers to fill up to the November 2008 issue of TCAS-I. An immediate, albeit only partial, remedy that TCAS-I will soon adopt in order to, at least partially, reduce authors’ frustration is to replace the mechanism of “preprint posting’’ with that of “rapid posting’’ of already accepted articles via the IEEEXplore website. In the first case, after receiving Digital Object Identifiers, the final versions of the manuscripts are posted on IEEEXplore (on the TCAS-I web site) approximately three weeks after submission and in the same format as the authors supplied them, without copy editing. In the ‘‘rapid posting’’ scheme, the copy-edited final versions of papers are posted, after Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSI.2008.919983

authors’ corrections, that is, in versions in which they will appear in print but omitting issue numbers and page numbers. This will certainly increase the likelihood that these papers may be cited by other authors. In addition to this, obviously more aggressive solutions are necessary. These include the following. 1) Reduction of the Average First Decision Time: I am very fortunate that several of the excellent Associate Editors who were part of the TCAS-II Editorial Board in 2006–2007 have accepted to serve with me in TCAS-I. With the addition of these and other high-profile scientists (as reported on the inside cover of the TRANSACTIONS) and with their unselfish, continuous effort, I am sure we can decrease the turnaround time. Despite the fact that the 60-days average first decision time that we achieved for the fast publication TCAS-II in the past two years is certainly not possible for TCAS-I, a reduction of this figure by 1 or 1.5 months may be achievable. 2) Increase of the Page Budget and of the Selectivity of the Journal: I will certainly encourage the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS-S) to make efforts to reduce this publication queue by temporally increasing the TCAS-I annual page budget. A reasonable level of reduction would be from the current nine months to a more acceptable sixmonth backlog. I also feel that the current situation demands a further strengthening of the selectivity of the review process. With this step, we hope, not only to assure that most important results submitted to TCAS-I will have the possibility to be printed shortly after acceptance, but also to increase the high standard of quality in the opinion of our readers. B. Clear Definition of the Scope of Journal and (Self-)Plagiarism Even though only a few months have elapsed since being at the helm of TCAS-I, I could not help noting the reasonably large number of submitted papers, especially in the areas of video and signal processing, power electronics, and automatic control, which are still out of scope for the TRANSACTIONS. If the submitted paper cites no paper or only a few papers published in prior issues of TCAS-I or TCAS-II, it is likely that the scope of the paper is beyond that of the journal and that it should be submitted elsewhere. To cope with this problem, we introduced an Editors’ Information Classification Scheme (EDICS, see http://tcas1.polito.it/Forms/kwlist.html), identical to the one already adopted last year for TCAS-II, whose benefit in terms of clear definition of the scope of the journal will hopefully show its positive effects in the near future. The EDICS is also meant to facilitate the assignment of papers to Associate Editors and reviewers (who are experts in the area of each submission) in conjunction with the improvements made through the CAS Web Manuscript System (CAS-WMS), described in my January 2007 Editorial of TCAS-II. The EDICS are meant

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to be dynamic and will be adjusted regularly in order to better reflect the interests of our authors as well as to attract new ones. A further issue relates to the appreciable number of papers which are relatively short, to the extent that they are (or could be reduced by proper formatting according to the standard twocolumn IEEE TRANSACTIONS style) to less than six pages. These should be submitted to TCAS-II and will be therefore returned to authors without review. Additionally, in these two months, I have experienced a worrying increase in the number of cases of authors engaging in improper scholar behavior. This include cases of double submission of papers to TCAS-I and to some other related TRANSACTIONS or even cases in which parts of other authors’ papers seem to have been plagiarized. Several cases are currently under investigation and the authors risk sanctions as specified in the IEEE CAS-S Policies and Procedures Manual (see http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/icss/policiesprocedures.php, section 6.2.2) and in the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB) Operations Manual. Last, but not least, there have been several cases of (almost) verbatim resubmissions of papers rejected by other TRANSACTIONS (even TCAS-II!), that is, which have not taken into account any of the comments of the reviewers. Despite the fact that this is not against any rule preventing double submission, and it could be justified in a few particular cases, in general, it can certainly be considered disrespectful towards the unselfish efforts of the anonymous reviewers and, in turn, of the whole peer review process, and must definitely be avoided. As a possible solution, it has been decided to adopt for TCAS-I the DUDE (DUplicate text Detection) System, developed by ACM SIGDA and IEEE CEDA volunteers, which will help us in combating these bad practices. C. Improvements of the CAS-WMS For at least the next two years, TCAS-I submissions will be made through the CAS-WMS located at http://tcas1.polito.it, where authors can find several important instructions related to the submission procedure and the editorial policy. In addition to the core engine improvements of the CAS-WMS that you have experienced in the past two years, a new Graphic User Interface (GUI) is currently in its final stage of development and should soon be released, thanks to the continuous efforts of Mr. Alberto Grosso, CAS-WMS administrator. We sincerely hope that all TCAS-I users [as well as those of TCAS-II, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS (TCAD), and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY (TCSVT)] will find this to be a further significant improvement which will make the CAS-WMS much more user friendly. My gratitude also goes to Prof. Enrico Macii for the time he has devoted to discussing the best ways to optimize both the structure and the GUI of the CAS-WMS. D. Improvements of the Performance Index Timely publication of the articles is certainly one of the metrics that characterize a good journal, but certainly not the only one. Bibliographic indexes, have assumed, in recent years, an increasing importance in the the evaluation of the performance of

a journal, the so-called Impact Factor (IF) being the most important one. This parameter refers basically to the average number of citations of the articles that appear in the journal and therefore relates to its level of penetration in the scientific community. TCAS-I current IF is certainly a good one, being currently at 1.13, a level steadily maintained in the past few years. With the aim of hopefully increasing it further, I plan to take a few specific actions, including the following. 1) Increase the interaction of TCAS-I with other IEEE TRANSACTIONS and Journals, in order to grow the potential audience of the journal in research communities beyond those which are our traditional targets. With respect to this, joint special issues are a very good vehicle, especially in interdisciplinary topics. 2) Explore the possibility of publishing the best papers presented at CAS Flagship Conferences, in a similar way to that which the Analog Signal Processing Technical Committee did, for instance, at ISCAS2006 and ISCAS2007. 3) Invite keynote contributions by outstanding authors from academia and industry which address areas at the boundaries of those traditional for CAS. The above list is certainly not exhaustive. More ideas may come from our readership, in which case, if you have proposals or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected]. I am very fortunate to have Professor Wouter Serdijn of the Technical University of Delft, the Netherlands, serve as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief for this TRANSACTIONS. Wouter is not only an esteemed and very hard-working colleague but also a very cordial person to collaborate with. He has also already proven extremely reliable by rapidly conducting, in the past few months, the review process of several old papers which we inherited at the time of transition. As a last note, let me stress that even the best Editorial Board is not capable of maintaining a high level journal with a short decision time without competent and diligent reviewers. I would like to take this opportunity to thank in advance the unselfish and vital service of the many reviewers that will be needed to evaluate the submissions TCAS-I will receive. I plan to acknowledge their work by publicly acknowledging the outstanding reviewers. Finally, and most importantly, we need excellent authors to maintain and increase the high quality of the journal even further. I wish therefore to invite all researchers working in the broad area of Circuits and Systems to consider submitting the most significant results of their research to TCAS-I.

GIANLUCA SETTI University of Ferrara Department of Engineering (ENDIF) Ferrara, 44100 Italy [email protected] Advanced Research Center for Electronic Systems (ARCES), University of Bologna Bologna, 40125 Italy [email protected]


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Gianluca Setti (S’89–M’91–SM’02–F’06) received the Dr.Eng. degree (with honors) in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering and computer science from the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 1992 and in 1997, respectively, for his contribution to the study of neural networks and chaotic systems. From May 1994 to July 1995, he was with the Laboratory of Nonlinear Systems (LANOS), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, as a Visiting Researcher. Since 1997, he has been with the School of Engineering at the University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Circuit Theory and Analog Electronics. His research interests include nonlinear circuits, recurrent neural networks, implementation and application of chaotic circuits and systems, statistical signal processing, electromagnetic compatibility, wireless communications and sensor networks. Dr. Setti received the 1998 Caianiello prize for the best Italian Ph.D. thesis on Neural Networks and he is co-recipient of the 2004 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS-S) Darlington Award, as well as of the Best Paper award at ECCTD2005 and the Best Student Paper Award at EMCZurich2005. He served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—I: REGULAR PAPERS (1999–2002 and 2002–2004) and of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS (2004–2007), the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (2004–2007), and as the Editor-in- Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS (2006–2007). Since January 2008, he is serving as the Editor-in-Chief of theIEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—I: REGULAR PAPERS. He was the 2004 Chair of the Technical Committee on Nonlinear Circuits and Systems of the IEEE CAS-S, a Distinguished Lecturer (2004–2005) and a member of the Board of Governors (since 2005) of the same society. He was also the Technical Program Co-Chair of NDES2000 (Catania, Italy) the Track Chair for Nonlinear Circuits and Systems of ISCAS2004 (Vancouver, BC, Canada), the Special Sessions Co-Chair of ISCAS2005 (Kobe, Japan) and ISCAS2006 (Kos, Greece), the Technical Program Co-Chair of ISCAS2007 (New Orleans, LA) and ISCAS2008 (Seattle), as well as the General Co-Chair of NOLTA2006 (Bologna, Italy). He is Co-editor of the book Chaotic Electronics in Telecommunications (CRC Press, 2000) and one of the Guest Editors of the May 2002 Special Issue of the PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE on Applications of Nonlinear Dynamics to Electronic and Information Engineering.