T PAMI is number 1! You may have seen the announcement on the cover of the September 2005 issue that the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence was ranked first of 209 publications in electrical engineering. It is also the fifth ranked journal of 347 in computer science, and the highest ranked IEEE publication. What do these rankings mean, and why is TPAMI doing so well?

Each year, Tomson ISI produces the Journal Citation Report, which includes a number of metrics on scholarly publications. The most widely valued metric, used in the above rankings, is the impact factor. This is a measure of the average number of times articles published in the two previous years are referenced by journals tracked by ISI in the given year. Based on TPAMI articles published in 2002 and 2003 and referenced in 2004, TPAMI's impact factor was 4.352. According to other metrics, TPAMI is also doing as well; articles in TPAMI were cited 12,485 times in 2004, and the average half life was 8.5 years (the number of years going back from the current year which account for 50 percent of the total citations received by the journal during the current year). While the impact factor definition may at first appear arbitrary, one realizes that the latter two metrics (total number of citations and half life) are strongly dependent on the journal's age and size, as well as the quality. Nonetheless, by all of these metrics, TPAMI sits at or near the top.

The goal of TPAMI's editorial board has always been to provide exceptional value to its readership by publishing the highest quality papers in a timely manner at a fair price. The above statistics affirm the quality of the published papers within TPAMI's scope, primarily focused on computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning. Kudos goes to Rama Chellappa, who was TPAMI's Editor-in-Chief during the reported period.

Regarding timeliness, I'm pleased to report that the review period for TPAMI has been significantly reduced over the past few years. The average time from submission to a first decision is just four months, down from eight months only two years ago. Most papers that are accepted require changes and a second round of reviews, which is then followed by a third set of revisions. While the editorial board has always desired a shorter review period, and authors have demanded it, much of the credit goes to Elaine Stephenson and Suzanne Werner, who have relentlessly pushed papers along by reminding reviewers and editors, and by breaking up occasional log jams. Likewise, the reviewers and editors have responded positively and have been very forthcoming. The role of the reviewers can't be underestimated or underappreciated since their evaluations are the primary basis for determining which papers are accepted. We are thrilled with the stature and quality of the associate editors on the Editorial Board and their tireless efforts. Finally, regarding price, Angela Burgess and Alicia Stickley have continued to contain costs and limit TPAMI's price increases while expanding the number pages printed per year.

We expect that TPAMI will receive over 700 submissions this year, and the acceptance rate has recently been about 30 percent. To handle the increasing volume of papers, we have continued to enlarge the Editorial Board and recruited an expanding pool of reviewers. To avoid a longer publication backlog, the 2006 page budget has been increased to 2,096 pages. Somehow, Julie Hicks, our Production Editor, manages to keep up with the volume. Yet, the constraints of a fixed page budget demand that we strictly enforce paper page limits. On the other hand, there is an opportunity to include reviewed supplemental materials which are digitally archived and available over the Internet. Examples of such materials include additional proofs or experimental results that might not fit within the page limits. It is also an opportunity to publish videos, images, multimedia materials, data sets, and code. We hope that authors will take greater advantage of this to better disseminate research results.

Yet, none of this explains why TPAMI's impact factor is so high. Personally, we think that it is simply the quality of the papers that authors are submitting, and so, TPAMI is able to report on some of the most exciting, relevant, and deepest aspects of computer science and electrical engineering. Techniques from computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning are able to solve a variety of real problems, yet it takes a very highly skilled team of individuals to realize a solution—just the type of person who would read TPAMI. Furthermore, the theory, techniques, and empirical validation are not yet mature, and so, TPAMI remains a lively avenue to report advances in all of these aspects. In short, TPAMI papers are being read and having a significant impact.

David J. Kriegman, Editor-in-Chief

David Fleet, Associate Editor-in-Chief