Editorial for IEEE Transactions
On Power Electronics, January 2013
ORIGINALLY, this editorial was planned to be written in late 2012, but in the last year we have been working intensively with IEEE to reduce time from submission to final publication, and this editorial was written in the summer of 2012, and we are already in the process of finalizing the January issue 2013. This also means that we have two editors for this issue— Prof. B. Lehman, Northeastern University, is fully taking over the duty of Editor-in-Chief as of date January 1, 2013, and Prof. F. Blaabjerg, Aalborg University, is resigning from the job at that date. We have only 100–150 papers waiting for publishing, and keeping in mind 45–50 papers are needed for each issue, this is a short and manageable backlog. By making the electronic versions of manuscripts available so far ahead of time, papers become available for a longer time, and there is a good chance for more citations, which should increase the impact factor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS (TPEL).
TPEL remains an outstanding Journal and it contributes dominantly to the power electronics technology and research development globally. The TRANSACTIONS performance is positioned very well in the global Electrical Engineering (EE) journals publications as it is among the top 10 most cited EE journals. In the last year, many indicators of our quality continued to improve: users of the TRANSACTIONS continue to be very satisfied with the paper quality, our reputation in power electronics is rising all over the world by having a fast review process, papers in the TRANSACTIONS are being cited more heavily, and we have continued to print useful future research on important and emerging industrial applications. Our publications are followed very carefully all over the world, and almost every month the TPEL has papers listed between the top 100 downloads from IEEE Xplore registered monthly. It is also worth remarking that the papers are mostly technology papers and not so much review papers.
Power electronics has never been as important as it is now. Globally, people talk about global warming and the lack of energy resources. As a result, a number of large R&D programs have been initiated to come up with sustainable solutions based on power electronics. Excellent examples of power electronic emerging research topics and applications include energy effi- ciency, e-mobility and airplanes, micro- and smart-grid, renewable energy, e.g., wind power and photovoltaic, lighting—fields where power electronics are unavoidable. Many companies have had rapid growth because of power electronics technology—in many cases they are called the clean-tech industry.
We still see an increased interest in TPEL. In 2011, we received more
