Editorial for IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, January 2013

The editors discuss the health of the Transactions, the rate of article submission, the time from submission to publication, and the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Impact Factor of the Transactions and contributing factors for that value. They note that the Transactions have only 100-150 articles waiting for publication, and keeping in mind 45-50 articles are needed for each issue, this is a short and manageable backlog. By making the electronic versions of manuscripts available so far ahead of time, articles are available for a longer time, and there is a good chance for more citations, which should increase the impact factor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS (TPEL). In 2007, TPEL published 2600 pages, and it has gradually been increased to 4000 pages in 2011, 5000 pages in 2012, and 5500 pages are projected for 2013. We have decided to publish 12 printed issues so every month a new issue will be printed. A graph is provided showing the number of regular papers received in the past years as well as the number of published pages in the TPEL. Finally they note that in 2008, TPEL obtained a record high value for the impact factor (as shown in a figure) but in 2009 it was reduced a little. In 2010, they saw an increase and were among the top 10 of all published EE journals on a global scale. In 2011, it further increased to 4.6 which is a record high. There are three main reasons for our success: 1) the time from submission to publication has been significantly reduced- allowing the papers to be read over a longer time span; 2) Web of Science (ISI Thomsen Reuter) began to register new power electronics conferences in their database, and citations from conferences counts and contributes to a higher impact factor.