IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2021 - 4

FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK
Going Strong
By Yi Guo
S
ince its inception in March 1994,
IEEE Robotics and Automation
Magazine (RAM) has published
four issues a year that
contain peer-reviewed articles with a
focus on working systems. It complements
journals of the IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society and emphasizes
creative solutions to real-world
We welcome more
submissions from
the community on
cutting-edge topics
and original research
findings on working
robotic systems with
readability in our
magazine style.
problems. This
summer, RAM
went through
the IEEE Periodicals
Review
and Advisory
Commit t e e
(PRAC) assessment,
wh i c h
is an IEEElevel
ap praisal
that is held
once every five
years. PRAC
reports that
RAM is a successful
magazine,
and its publication quality
remains high. In June, a new impact
factor of 5.143 for RAM was released
by Clarivate's Journal Citation Re -
ports. While the quality of a journal
(or magazine) as evaluated by journal
bibliometric indicators cannot be
captured by any single measure, with
all other indicators and the PRAC
results, we believe that RAM is going
strong as a premier medium of technology
publication in the field of
robotics and automation.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2021.3095733
Date of current version: 10 September 2021
I would like to take the
opportunity to provide some
data about the magazine.
Table 1 shows the submission
data, acceptance rate,
and turnaround time for the
past five years. We can see that
the submission to RAM has been stable
during the past two years, and the
acceptance rate is around 30%. Thanks
to the immediate past Editor-in-Chief
Bram Vanderborght and the Editorial
Board, the turnaround times are shorter
than before, and the average time from
submission to the first decision has been
fewer than three months for the past
three years. We will make every effort to
keep the competitive turnaround time
without sacrificing peer-review quality.
We welcome more submissions from
the community on cutting-edge topics
and original research findings on working
robotic systems with readability in
our magazine style.
During the 2021 IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA) this May, the
sixth IEEE Robotics and
Automation Magazine
Best Paper Award was
announced. The award
paper " Vine Robots: De sign,
Teleoperation, and Deployment
for Navigation and Exploration, " by
Coad et al., was published in the
September 2020 issue. We congratulate
the authors on this achievement.
This open access article is available in
IEEE Xplore.
After two special issues published in
March and June, this September issue is
a regular issue that contains 11 featured
regular, survey, tutorial, and reproducible
articles. The regular articles discuss
robotic assistants to support caregivers
(by Vogel et al.), unmanned aerial and
ground robots for agriculture (by Pretto
et al.), dual-arm robots for intralogistics
(by Garabini et al.), and underwater robots
to support human-robot interaction
(by Chavez et al.). Morimoto et al.
provide an educational article on
Table 1. RAM Submission Data and Timeliness.
Year
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
Submission
169
164
115
105
104
Acceptance Rate1
32%
27%
30%
29%
17%
First Decision
2.3
2.3
2.3
3.2
3.3
Timeliness2 (in Months)
Accepted
5.25
6.23
7.6
7.11
6.67
1Acceptance rate for given year: acceptance rate = accepted/(editorial rejected + rejected
+accepted).
2Timeliness for given year is shown as average time in months from submission to first decision
and accepted, respectively.
4 * IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE * SEPTEMBER 2021

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2021