State of the Journal

I would like to thank the associate editors who have completed their term during 2011: Elisa Bertino, Nicholas Bruno, Christopher Clifton, Minos Garofalakis, and Maurizio Lenzerini, and would like to formally welcome the new associate editors who joined the editorial board in 2011: Deepak Agarwal, James Bailey, Kaushik Chakrabarti, Lei Chen, Gautam Das, Aristides Gionis, Panagiotiss Ipeirotis, Zachary Ives, Latifur R. Khan, Yehuda Koren, Anthony T.H. Tung, Jianyong Wang, and Hongyuan Zha. I would also like to thank Jian Pei for agreeing to renew his term as an associate editor-in-chief and for helping me with the recruitment of associate editors and handling submissions. Without their contributions, the reviewing process would not have been possible. Once again, as could be observed from the list of newly appointed associated editors, we have made conscious efforts to recruit well-established researchers with diverse backgrounds and strengths, and from different regions of the world. We will continue to look for highly qualifi ed editors who are committed and dedicated to handling the review process. 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. In 2011, we published three special issues/sections: the best papers of the 26th IEEE ICDE (International Conference of Data Engineering 2010), Cloud Data Management, and Keyword Search on Structured Data, which, respectively, appeared in the August, September, and December 2011 issues. I would like to thank the ICDE best papers special issue editors: Shahram Ghandeharizadeh Jayant Haritsa, and Gerhard; the Cloud Data Management special issue editor,:David Lomet; and the Keyword Search special issue editors: Surajit Chaudhuri, Yi Chen, and Jeffrey Xu Yu for their time and contributions. The issues contained very solid papers that addressed contemporary research issues. I hope the readers found them interesting and useful for their research and development. In the new year, we shall continue to enhance the editorial board as well as the quality and composition of the papers, and I hope to get your support in this regard, as a good journal will benefi t most of us, especially the graduate students. I am happy to announce that TKDE will be transitioning to the OnlinePlusTM publication model in 2013. OnlinePlusTM is a hybrid of online only and print where subscribers will receive full archival online access plus four quarterly abstract books. In addition, they will receive interactive disks that contain the complete contents of every issue, including supplemental material, all for a lower price than traditional print. For those subscribers who like having a print copy of an issue, all OnlinePlus titles have a Print on Demand option. Please visit www.computer.org/onlineplus for more information. I would like to conclude this note by thanking all the associate editors, guest editors, reviewers, and authors for their hard work, understanding, and support. Thanks very much indeed.