Improving the process [of publishing in this Transactions]

This is the first issue in which page numbers and volume numbers are being assigned to papers as they arrive and are posted on IEEE Xplore before publication. We hope and expect that having accepted papers pre-posted and fully citable will allow more people to use and acknowledge the results of your research. As you know, our volume of papers being published is significantly larger this year as we have taken care of our backlogged papers. We expect to take advantage of electronic publishing to keep very close track of the number of needed pages to maintain a minimal time to publication. There is a way that authors can help reduce the time to publication. The inclusion of a careful literature survey which discusses the most recent relevant work to that being presented, and experimental comparisons to such work where feasible, will significantly ease the job of the referee in evaluating the paper. There are many times when the first round of review consists mostly of referees suggesting relevant work which the work in the submitted paper needs to be evaluated against or clearly differentiated from. Without this information it is often not possible for a complete evaluation of the paper to be done and the truly necessary revisions pointed out. Of course, it is necessary to show that the work is new and significant and comparisons and differentiation from the most relevant recent work is the clearest way to show this.