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Publications

ComSoc Publications: The Lifeblood of Our Society

Khaled B. Letaief

Khaled B. Letaief

Parliamentarian

Sherman Shen

Xuemin (Sherman) Shen

Past President

2024

IEEE ComSoc publications have one of the highest reputations and impact in the technical community and are a key pillar to serve our members and the community at large. In this month President’s page, I am pleased to introduce Xuemin (Sherman) Shen, Vice-President for Publications, who will share with you the actions we have taken to further enhance ComSoc’s leading role in communications and networking through high quality publications in journals, magazines, and online content.

Xuemin (Sherman) Shen received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1990 from Rutgers University, USA. Currently, he is a University Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada. He has made significant research contributions in resource management for interconnected wireless/wired networks, wireless network security, social networks, vehicular ad hoc and sensor networks, and smart grid. Professor Shen is the recipient of the 2015 Joseph LoCicero Award and the 2017 Education Award from the IEEE Communications Society. He served as the Technical Program Committee Chair/Co-Chair for IEEE Globecom’16, IEEE Infocom’14, IEEE VTC’10 Fall, IEEE Globecom’ 07; Symposia Chair for IEEE ICC’10; Tutorial Chair for IEEE VTC’11 Spring; Chair for the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Wireless Communications; and a Member-at-Large on the Board of Governors of IEEE Communications Society (2014-2016). He is a Fellow of prestigious institutes, including the IEEE, Engineering Institute of Canada, Canadian Academy of Engineering, and Royal Society of Canada. He is a registered Professional Engineer of Ontario, Canada, and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society and Communications Society.

Scientific publications are the lifeblood of our society as they provide a forum for presenting the latest research results and emerging new technologies. With the rapidly changing technical fields, it is important to undertake challenges to meet the diversified needs and to provide the most benefits to our members. Recently, ComSoc launched an open access all-electronic technical journal, the IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society. The open access journal will publish high-impact research results in the general area of communications and networking with a rigorous and extremely rapid one-stage peer-review process. The scope encompasses research papers reporting novel fundamental theoretical contributions, experimental and measurement results, and new applications of communication systems and networks. This journal will complement our existing journals and attract more students and non-ComSoc members to enhance the technical content in communications and networking due to its open access nature. The first issue of the journal will appear in January 2020. In addition, we have made significant efforts to include emerging technical areas, such as artificial intelligence (machine learning in particular), 5G systems and beyond, edge/fog computing, and big data, in our well established journals and magazines to further extend their scope. Furthermore, we have launched the option of having an additional 5th page for all ComSoc Letters for the benefit of our members.

ComSoc journals and magazines are characterized by their high quality and excellent reputation. This is evident from their high impact factors as published by the Web of Science. For example, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials currently has an impact factor over 20, which is the highest among all journals published in telecommunications; IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications has an impact factor of 9.3 and all of our established transactions and journals have impact factors above 4. Further, ComSoc magazines, including IEEE Wireless Communications, IEEE Communications Magazine and IEEE Network, have outstanding performance in terms of the impact factor, ranking 2nd, 3rd, and 6th, respectively, in telecommunications (top three among the magazines in this category). These impact factors have significantly increased and in some cases more than doubled over the past five years. The striking improvement is a direct result of the tireless and dedicated work of the Editors-in-Chief, Editors, and Reviewers of our journals. In order to further improve the metrics and our service to authors and readers across all journals and magazines, Robert Schober (Director of Journals) and Michael Fang (Director of Magazines) played the leading role in developing and implementing a set of guidelines and best practices for newly appointed Editors-in-Chief and Editors of ComSoc journals and magazines. Furthermore, we are preparing a set of guidelines for Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs), which form the basis for the operation of journals and magazines that are co-sponsored with other IEEE societies.

In addition, ComSoc provides various unique formats of online content to our members, including (but not limited to) Webinars, Tutorials, Best Readings (BR), and ComSoc Technology News (CTN). Since its initiation in 2002, the online platform has been recognized as an alternative and sometimes more effective way to promptly catch up with emerging technology trends. Under the leadership of Zhisheng Niu (Director of OnLine Content), we have achieved this recognition via 1) creative and comprehensive presentation of technical materials from leading experts in the fields; and 2) prompt online posting of such presentations. Our online content is not simply a supplement to the print publications, but serves as a portal or starting point for our members to jump into a new field and to draw an overall picture of a specific technology. In particular, Best Readings is a collection of articles, books, and papers focused on a featured topic. It aims to provide our members with a friendly starting point to explore a new technical topic. For example, if you want to learn about eHealth, go to Best Readings, where experts have compiled a complete introduction to the field. On the other hand, we have CTN, which presents a set of recent articles. It highlights ongoing research activities that may impact tomorrow’s telecommunications products, and should be of interest to our industry members. Our team has been working diligently to keep the content fresh and comprehensive. To further enhance our online content, we are in the process of forming a dedicated editorial team to work closely with the ComSoc technical committees and the emerging technologies sub-committees. We are also working on a pilot project to create mobile video modules for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

Finally, we continue to work with all of you to promote the excellence of our community. We welcome all suggestions and comments for enhancing the ComSoc publications.