State of the Journal Editorial

Ç AS you are reading this issue, we just wrapped up a wonderful year. In the first 10 months, TKDE received a total of 1,225 submissions—915 were original submissions and 310 were revisions. These numbers present a slight increase from 2014. Proudly, we are the most popular flagship journal in the broad, data related areas, including data science, big data, data engineering, data mining, databases and systems, information retrieval, and many others. As usual, we are working very hard to shorten the review period and improve the review quality and author and reviewer experience. For example, among the submissions received in the first 10 months of 2015, the final decisions were made on 627 by the end of October. TKDE remains a very competitive venue for publishing the best research results. For example, among the 552 regular articles submitted in the first 10 months of 2015, 17 were invited for minor revision and an additional 117 were invited for major revision. Among the 244 revisions of regular articles received in the first 10 months of 2015, only 134 have been accepted, and another 91 were asked for further revision. TKDE is truly international. Authors from 61 countries and regions submitted to TKDE in the first 10 months of 2015. The largest number of submissions were received from Mainland China (245), followed by the United States (122), India (84), Australia (51), Hong Kong (39), and Taiwan (32). Among the 171 articles accepted in those 10 months, 46 were from Mainland China (20.6 percent success rate), 33 from the United States (30.0 percent success rate), 15 from Australia (41.67 percent success rate), 13 from Hong Kong (52.0 percent success rate), and 8 from Singapore (29.6 percent success rate). I am also very pleased to report several on-going initiatives within TKDE. We are continuing the exercise of attracting vision articles from research leaders. The goal is to have 2-3 such articles every year to address emerging opportunities and challenges in a big picture within the scope of TKDE. We are also partnering with the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) to experiment with the new TKDE poster track starting with the ICDE 2016 conference. Selected regular research articles accepted for TKDE in 2015 have been invited to present a two-page extended abstract in the Proceedings of ICDE 2016 and a poster in the poster session of the conference. I am very grateful to Professor Xuemin Lin, associate editor-in-chief, who is leading this initiative. We are organizing one or two special issues on emerging topics in the areas. Professor Lei Chen, associate editor-in-chief, is working on this initiative. We also had a very productive editorial board meeting in April 2015 during the ICDE 2015 conference. Several interesting ideas were discussed. Some will be implemented soon. The last year of my current term as the editor-in-chief will be 2016. I am very excited to welcome the next editor-in-chief, who will be selected later this year. I encourage you to invest your time and service spirit to TKDE by running for the office or nominating an established researcher who you believe can play a leadership role. I want to sincerely thank Drs. James Bailey, Lei Chen, Gautam Das, Aristides Gionis, Zachary G. Ives, Jianyong Wang, and Hongyuan Zha, who just completed their terms as associate editors. Their significant contributions helped to maintain and further enhance the quality and reputation of TKDE. As always, on behalf of the TKDE editorial board and the editorial office, I thank all of the authors, readers, and reviewers for your enthusiastic support. We look forward to continuing to serve you to the best in the future.