Editorial: State of the Journal
Bashar Nuseibeh · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 2011
HAPPY New Year. It has been exactly one year since I started as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), so in this editorial I would like to refl ect on to refl ect on this last year and to share with you some facts and fi gures and my plans for the next year. In my fi rst editorial last January, I suggested three medium term goals for the journals that I reiterate below and which I believe still hold: 1. To reemphasize the broad scope of the journal, encouraging the publication of multidisciplinary research as well as specialization in software engineering. 2. To engage with the software engineering community at large, including other journals, about the software engineering discipline, using not only the journal itself as a forum but through other professional outlets such as conferences and the Web. 3. To support a debate on the nature of scholarly discourse in software engineering, such as the kind and length of papers published in the journal, or the different forms of peer review and discussion around what is published. My fi rst goal above is rather subtle. The scope of the journal is already quite precisely defi ned and has not changed for some time. However, I still believe that as software—and software engineering—continues to permeate society and the development of systems of all kinds, software engineering research also has opportunities to grow. To grow in terms of its interaction with other disciplines outside its traditional boundaries, but also to grow it terms of specialization within, say, problem domain boundaries. To this end, I have encouraged the TSE editorial board to help solicit a broader range of submissions, but also to handle submissions outside TSE’s traditional boundaries with tolerance, even enthusiasm. This sometimes means making an additional effort to guide authors to formulate or reformulate submissions to make the work more accessible to a software engineering audience. The impact of this approach will take some time to have a visible effect, as most of the papers submitted to TSE in 2010 have yet to be published. With respect to my second goal above, community engagement is an ongoing effort. In 2010 I met with the editorsin-chief of many of the software engineering research journals, and we discussed ways in which we can help present research that is novel and exciting, that is rigorous and well-presented, and that is relevant and useful to readers of our publications. I have encouraged, but only been partially successful, in engaging TSE readers to contribute to the debate about the discipline of software engineering. I say “partially successful” because there has been almost no discussion on the TSE electronic forum, but I have received many individual e-mails from readers addressing very specifi c issues, such as those that I raise in my regular editorials. It does seem that an open ended invitation to discuss the discipline is too vague to engage most readers, and so I will continue to discuss specifi c topics in each issue of the journal. The third goal above is one that has been receiving attention from other journal and magazine editors as well. I do sense that the value of journal publications in software engineering is back on the rise, and I feel that my appeal to authors to submit different kinds (and lengths) of manuscripts is being addressed. I have said previously that there is nothing sacred about the kind and length of a software engineering research contribution, and in the last year TSE received more short and a few very long manuscripts. In all cases, I have asked associate editors to consider if content justifi es the length, rather than be distracted by any notion of suggested manuscript length. Papers published in 2011 will be partly the result of such an approach. What else have I learned from year 1? Well, personally, I have been saddened to observe that much of my time is spent handling exceptions of the rather unpleasant variety—plagiarism, duplicate or overlapping submissions, and, in a few cases, appeals. I have absolutely no problem at all with appeals. Authors should feel free to question review decisions on their papers—the review process is not infallible—and queries or complaints help test the robustness of the process and the resultant decisions. Similarly, I encourage readers to write and question or discuss published papers’ content. Some readers have chosen to do this anonymously and that’s fi ne, although I would welcome more open technical commentaries, which TSE has the mechanism to publish in hardcopy or in the digital library. What does bother me are the incidents of what can only be termed unethical behavior—such as plagiarism. The penalties for this are severe, and a “prohibited authors” list is updated and circulated among all IEEE editors each month, with each additional named author fully investigated before being “blacklisted” and barred from future submission to the journal. Incidence of self-plagiarism or duplicate submissions are equally troubling, and a real time drain for editors and reviewers. In a future editorial, I will also discuss the undesirable phenomenon of an LPU—a “least publishable unit”—which unfortunately seems be a way for some authors to increase their publication counts by publishing very small incremental contributions over previously published work. Duplicate or heavily overlapping submissions are often detected, due to the limited and specialized community of reviewers and the open and interactive relationships between journal editors.