Note from the IEEE Education Society VP Publications

Dear Colleagues.

As Vice President for Publications of our Society it is my pleasure to work with you all to make the transition to a world of publication where many funding agencies are prioritizing open access publication of scientific results. Our Society has three journals which provide our members with the opportunity to publicize and disseminate their research findings, inventions and insights. In addition to these Journals, Transactions on Education, Transactions on Learning Technologies, and RITA - Revista Iberoamericana de Tecnologias del Aprendizaje we also have a range of International Conferences of the highest standard, among them Frontiers in Education, TALE, and EDUCON which provide our members with the opportunity to meet and discuss research ideas and the goal of advancing engineering education for the benefit of humanity and the world as a whole. 

As we make the transition into this brave new world, our revenue sources are changing, and we have been required to revise the manner in which we deliver our publications to our members. From 2020, the IEEE Transactions on Education will cease print publication  and join the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies and RITA as an electronic publication, remaining accessible and searchable via IEEE Xplore. This change allows us to invest in additional copy-editing support, as well as provide a long-term plan for supporting our members in disseminating their work in an effective manner. 

Publication of outstanding research is our goal, and as VP for Publications I would like to take the opportunity to observe that it is important for us all as a community that we continue to read each other’s research and build on prior results. Research published in our journals does not arise in isolation, it has many connections to other research conducted by our colleagues, and where appropriate we should cite that relevant research in our journals in support of our current results. I encourage you to read our journals widely and refer to prior work where appropriate. 

As you all would be aware our journals are listed in both the SCOPUS and Clarivate Analytics ISI Web of Science databases. New impact metrics for these databases have recently been made public. It is pleasing to me to observe a uniform increase in the impact and citation indexes of our flagship journals. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies’ Impact Factor has risen to 2.315 in the Clarivate metric, the highest it has ever been since TLT was first included in the JCR in 2011, and the 5-year Impact Factor, of TLT currently stands at 3.213. The Scopus’ CiteScore is the other major bibliometric measure and in that regard the Transactions on Learning Technologies has risen steadily from 1.97 in 2011 to 3.60 in 2018, placing TLT in the top five of educational technology journals based on that measure.

Our flagship journal, the IEEE Transactions on Education (ToE), has also seen its Impact Factor rise this year to a record high for that journal of 2.214 in the Clarivate scale.

This impressive performance makes our journals some of the highest impact venues in the discipline and I encourage you to take advantage of that fact and submit your work for consideration for publication. We look forward to continuing to support the engineering education research community and the dissemination of results that change the face of engineering education for the better.

Sincerely,

Arnold Pears