State of the Journal (IEEE TKDE, Feb 2012)

The number of submissions in 2010 was 704, and the number of submissions in 2011 was about 680 (projection that includes submissions for the month of December). As mentioned before, it is our primary goal to improve the quality of the journal, and the number of submissions does not quite refl ect the quality of the journal. Rather, the quality and timeliness of the papers are better refl ections of the quality of the journal. We have kept the acceptance rate around 17 percent, and the turnaround time to about 2.4 months in 2011. The reviewing process does take up a lot of the associate editors’ and reviewers’ time, so it is important for the journal to attract better quality submissions. We have therefore been more critical with the screening of submissions before assigning them to reviewers. As in the past, many papers that are out of the scope of TKDE and are not ready for review were administratively rejected. I have also spent time randomly checking the submissions using cross-checking software, and have rejected a number of papers where the authors did not declare prior work clearly and that contained material from papers belonging to others.