Editorial [2012 & 2013 Associate Editors]

The Editor-in-Chief (EiC) sincerely thanks the 14 associate editors who completed their terms by June 2013: Torsten Grust, Jayant Haritsa, Maurizio Lenzerini, Renee Miller, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Kian-Lee Tan, Jun Yang, Xiaofang Zhou, Bin Cui, Ravi Kumar, Timos Sellis, and Justin Zobel. They have contributed significantly to the quality and the reputation of TKDE. Without the associate editors, many reviewers, and enormous authors' joint effort, our journal would not be as good as it is today. At the same time, he formally welcomes the associate editors who joined the editorial board in the first half of 2013: Shivnath Babu, Francesco Bonchi, Chee-Yong Chan, Kevin Chang, Sanjay Chawla, Ian Davidson, Ruoming Jin, Panos Kalnis, Xuemin Lin, Dan Olteanu, Naren Ramakrishnan, Mark Sanderson, Ambuj Singh, and Hui Xiong. This group of newly appointed associate editors represents our interest and determination in recruiting the best established and active working experts in the wonderful wide spectrum of knowledge and data engineering. Moreover, they are very committed and dedicated to serving the community and handling the review processes, as testified by their rich experience. In less than 6 months (1 January to 20 May, 2013), TKDE received 340 original submissions and 134 revised submissions. In the same period, 475 decisions were made and 66 papers (13.9%) were accepted, 83 papers (17.5 percent) needed major revisions, and 56 papers (11.8%) needed minor revisions. These numbers clearly show that TKDE is a highly preferred and competitive forum for publishing the strongest research outcome in our fields. The associate editors, the reviewers, and I are working hard to shorten the turn-around time as much as possible without any compromise on quality. For example, 217 of the 340 original submissions (63.8%) submitted between Jan- May 2013 already received a decision. Without the fabulous team of hardworking associate editors and the large base of constructive and responsible reviewers, the review process is simply a mission impossible.