By the time you read this message, the annual IEEE EMC Symposium that was held in Long Beach (CA) this year will be history. In the meantime, while waiting for the usual detailed report on the exciting symposium week to come in the Fall 2011 issue of this Newsletter, I wish to cover in this message a few “hot topics”.

Forthcoming Launch in 2012
of the IEEE EMC Society Magazine
As already announced in my President’s message that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue, at the beginning of 2012 the transition of the EMC Newsletter into the EMC Magazine will be effective. The EMC Society Newsletter has been looking like a magazine for many years, therefore, under the aesthetical viewpoint, the magazine will not look much different from what we are used to right now. In any case, the transition is a kind of upgrade for our Newsletter. If we look at the IEEE ranking of periodicals, a Magazine is more valuable than a Newsletter. The Magazine content will be included in the IEEE Xplore digital library and indexed in the official Journal Citation Report. This is the major novelty of becoming a magazine and it will give a much wider exposure to the published technical papers and other content. An increased number of practical papers per issue is also planned. I would like to take this opportunity to solicit authors to take into serious consideration the possibility of submitting the outcome of their practical research and design tips for publication in the forthcoming EMC Magazine. In closing, I wish to bring to your attention the new logo of the IEEE EMC magazine so that you can start to become familiar with it.

Impact Factor (IF) of Journals
The Impact Factor (IF) is increasingly popular as an index used for evaluating and ranking journals. Even if almost everyone has heard about the IF, I am not so sure how many of you are really familiar with it and its increasing use. For this reason, I’ll go through a brief historical background.
     The IF is a measure reflecting the average number of citations of articles published in science and social science journals and was developed to compare journals regardless of their size. It was devised in the 60s by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now part of Thomson Reuters. Impact factors are calculated yearly for those journals that are indexed in Thomson Reuter’s Journal Citation Report (JCR).

Definition
The IF is a measure of the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period. The annual JCR impact factor is a ratio between citations and recent citable items published during a rolling two year window. Thus, the IF of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations by the source items published in that journal during the previous two years:

     As an example, the 2010 IF is calculated assuming:
     NoC = number of citations in 2010 of papers published in 2008–2009
     NoAP = number of the citable items in 2008–2009

Journals with High IF Published Articles That are
Cited More Often Than Journals with Lower If
If citation numbers are taken as a measure of quality or importance, then these journals are ranked higher by this measure.

Criticisms of IF
The Impact Factor is historically the most diffused bibliographic index since it is simple to compute and understand. It has, however, some drawbacks, including:

• Two-year window (short snapshot) - Using a time window of two years to account for citations may not be enough in some domains. In fact, some disciplines use older material more or take time to cite new research. As a consequence of this, the IF may fluctuate significantly from year to year. To overcome this problem, JCR now also includes the 5-year data.
  
• Artificial inflation – The IF is prone to manipulation to achieve artificial inflation. Some editors and journals request authors to cite recently published papers in the same journal before providing the final acceptance, or encourage self-citations. These unethical practices are strongly affecting the fairness and credibility of the IF, and should be prohibited by serious journals.
  

In addition, there are a number of issues strongly affecting the IF, including the number of journals published in a discipline, the ISI coverage, the language (biased toward English-language journals), publication type (specialty Journals have lower IF), journal size, and self citations.

Applications of IF
Perhaps the most important and recent use of impact factor is in the process of academic evaluation. For some researchers, monitoring citation statistics and journal impact factors is an intensely serious business. In many European and Asian universities, for example, the IFs of the journals in which scientists publish their work are tallied, and the data plugged into formulae that directly influence a scientist’s career advancement and the funding given to individual departments and research groups. Worldwide, citation statistics are increasingly being used as a convenient metric to assess the quality of scientists’ work.
     In summary, the several applications of journal impact factors include:

• Judge publication quality and prestige
  
• Evaluate the scholarly merit of a journal
  
• Rank journals within a discipline
  
• Help authors decide where to publish their article for maximum impact
  
• Evaluation of scholarly research and individual performance for purposes of promotion/tenure/grants, and funding
  
• Evaluation of departments, institutions, and nations
  
• Journal assessment/marketing by publishers
  
• Evaluation source for librarians during journal cancellations or new purchases
  

     Considering the mentioned criticisms, the reliability of the IF for ranking journals is quite arguable, and for this reason other bibliographic indexes (i.e., eigenfactor, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), etc.) are being investigated. Intuitively, a “good quality index” should:

• Give a result which corresponds to the technical quality of the papers published in that journal;
  
• Be consistent over time (it takes a long time to build the reputation of a publication and it is reasonable to expect that a good quality index should not exhibit large fluctuations over a limited time); and
  
• Be immune to external manipulation (it should be very difficult to artificially manipulate its value).
  

     Even if Thomson Reuters is recommending using the IF wisely - since without an informed and careful use of the impact data, users may be tempted to jump to ill-formed conclusions - right now the increasing popularity is encouraging an extensive use of this index without addressing enough attention to its criticisms.

Impact Factor of the IEEE
Transactions on EMC
After the significant increase achieved last year, unfortunately this year the IF of the IEEE Transactions on EMC fell, subject to the fluctuations affecting the bibliographic index. The chart below shows the fluctuation of our IF over the past three years.
     Our Editor-in-Chief, Heyno Garbe, and his dedicated team of associate editors and reviewers are actually doing an excellent job and they all deserve a sincere thank you for their efforts. In any case, there is always room for improvement.
     Regardless of its limitations and criticisms, the IF will likely be around for a long timep the key is to understand how we can help in stabilizing the IF of the IEEE Transactions on EMC while avoiding unethical manipulations. The goal of this discussion is to build the awareness of our membership in general and, in particular, those involved with the publication of the IEEE Transactions on EMC, such as authors, reviewers and associate editors. It is in the interest of all of us that the IEEE Transactions on EMC is highly ranked. I would like to take this opportunity to raise a few important points that may help to avoid such strong IF fluctuations in the future:

• It is crucial to increase the EMC relevance of the published papers. To this aim, papers appearing in our journal should clearly show their relevance and impact to the EMC field and provide a suitable and extensive state of art in the discipline in the paper, especially highlighting the EMC related aspects. Both authors and associate editors can help with this.
  
• Associate editors and reviewers should make a further effort to reduce the review cycle so that innovative papers appear timely in the journal.
  
• Authors should try to reduce the number of self-citations since if their percentage is too high they are being filtered and do not provide any contribution to the IF calculation.
  

     We should all be aware of the IF of our IEEE Transactions on EMC in order to help attract even better contributions that are of relevance to the EMC discipline. It is of paramount importance that the IEEE Transactions on EMC continues to be considered as the most qualified to publish the most significant results in EMC.

Use of Cell Phones on Airplanes
The last “hot topic” of this President’s Message deals with a worrying and annoying case of misuse of our Society name. In October 2010, the Boston Globe, in both its local and its national (on-line) editions, published an article titled, “Attention passengers: It’s perfectly safe to use your cell phones (on an airplane)”. It was authored by Globe reporter Justin Bender. The most surprising thing isn’t the news itself, but the fact that Mr. Bender cited as proof of this safety, “A study by the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society...”! This Globe story quickly was reported in two (or more) publication vehicles serving our Society and fellow E³ technologists (including ITEM Publications, et. al.).
     I wish to thank Dick Ford for his dedication in investigating this matter and help in drafting a letter to the Globe management. In the letter sent in December 2010, it was clarified that: “These statements are not true.” It was also advised that, “Our Society is aware of no evidence either within our Society or worldwide which supports unrestricted use of cell phones on airplanes at this point. We are looking at how well the new system currently used in Europe is functioning, as well as changes in technology and spectrum usage, as to whether, and in what circumstances, cell phone use on airplanes might be permitted. But at present it is NOT perfectly safe to use your cell phone (on an airplane). Please take steps to correctly inform the public of this issue and our position.”
     Several months have passed, and no response was received from the Boston Globe in reply to the letter. In any case, based on contacts with reporters working for the Globe, we assumed that Mr. Bender had returned to Germany and was not available for comment.

Next Board of Directors Meeting
The next EMC Society Board of Directors (BoD) meeting is scheduled on November 16 and 17, in Piscataway (NY). I remind you that the meeting of the EMC Society BoD is open. Any members who want to attend will be most welcome.

Call for Volunteers
The success of our Society is possible thanks to many fine volunteers who have contributed unselfishly of their time and talent. As the Society evolves, and new initiatives emerge, we are always in need of volunteers. Please, give serious consideration to becoming involved in our broad and challenging goals and objectives. The full list of committees can be found on our website at https://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/directors.html.
     I look forward to working with all of you who join the volunteers of the Society in helping achieve the set of our goals for the benefit of us all. For making a suggestion, comment, or just for dropping a friendly note, please do not hesitate to e-mail me at: fr.maradei@ieee.org.                 EMC