Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine October 2017 - 3

From the Associate Editor-in-Chief
OCTOBER 2017

DOI. No. 10.1109/MAES.2017.177010

everal months hence I bent your ears about "citation stacking," this being a practice both seemingly
weird in itself and apparently odd for me to get exercised about. It refers to the various means to encourage bibliographic references to a specific journal (or group of journals or body of work) with the aim
of inflating the "numbers." For a researcher, these numbers are the citation count or h-index: a researcher
with h=24, say, has authored 24 works each cited 24 or more times. And for a publication, the number is the
impact factor (IF), the average number of times each published article is cited over a rolling period, usually
two years. Both numbers are often (yes, too often) a proxy for quality. Bigger is better.
I'm not sure how a researcher could manipulate his/her own citation count in a meaningful way: remember that for senior researchers these counts are quite high (see Google Scholar) and an extra few would have
little import. And anyway, I don't know what would happen if such behavior was caught; but I'm forever
in awe of my academic colleagues' creativity. On the other hand, publications are monitored ("indexed")
regularly and professionally - in our field by Clarivate Analytics. Bibliometric manipulation can be obPeter Willett
served indirectly by inexplicable improvements in key indices, most notably impact factor. If wrongdoing is
confirmed, a publication can be suspended. A suspended journal has no impact factor. Even past-published
articles in a suspended journal become suspect.
If you've ever looked at a researcher's h-index to see if you really need to pay attention, or if you've ever decided where to submit your
article based on impact ... you're not alone, and actually, I'll admit, I've done it too. And I'm aware that many of my international colleagues
are judged by where they publish more than what: a good and highly-cited article in a journal with a low IF may do less for a career than a
mediocre one that scrapes into a journal with a high IF and then gets justly ignored. There is an excellent presentation by Gianluca Setti whose
message - here distilled to far too few words - is that if you really need "numbers" please use several together, and not just (say) impact factor. And ... please understand how they are calculated. I will give you more information from Dr. Setti in a future editorial.
Let's go on to nicer matters. And a much nicer matter is Maria Sabrina Greco. Sabrina, my boss at Systems Magazine, is the incoming
AESS VP of Publications. Sabrina will replace current VP of Publications Dale Blair in January 2018. Dale, whose term is ending, has done
a wonderful job as VP Pubs these last three years, dealing with all sorts of matters that you all are thankfully shielded from, and facilitating
promising publication initiatives like early-posting and enhanced archiving. I'm excited to work with Sabrina in the future. She has a lot to
live up to in Dale, but I think she'll do it.
This month we have (as usual) articles that make me proud. Leppinen (from Aalto) explores the benefits promised and issues posed by
basing spacecraft information systems on Linux. As he notes: "Platform-independent, Linux-targeted software could even be developed and
used across various missions" - but if so, there are concerns that must be addressed. Next, a large team from Wichita State discusses morphing
aircraft that enable "a single aircraft to perform multiple missions during a single flight by executing its shape change feature." The article
focuses on measurement of structural deformation, which of course is key when the deformation must stay controlled and stable.
Fertig and Baden from GTRI and Guerci from ISL offer their expertise on the role of knowledge-aided processing in multipath-exploitation
radar. MER is an exciting and emerging technology that facilitates surveillance in traditionally (mostly) denied venues such as downtown /
urban. The results are intriguing, and show that "[c]ontrary to the view that multipath is a problem, it is evident that the proper exploitation of
multipath enables localization and tracking superior to that obtained in the absence of multipath." Our last regular article is from a team based at
the French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis. It introduces the idea of the gun-launched micro air vehicle (GLMAV). The "GL" is key,
since the ability of hovering MAVs to observe is of little use if their slow progress to the site of interest risks the site being ... no longer of interest. The article focuses on the electronics, and especially the vision system - these must be effective but also robust due to the means of delivery.
The issue ends with a Student Highlight and an AESS Historical Interview. The Student Highlight is a neat application of earth-mover's
distance as a means to register objects prior to image-based tracking. EMD, an emerging metric from the image-processing community, offers a focused methodology to register and match scenes as observation perspectives and target appearances change. Following the Student
Highlight is an interview with Professor Hugh Griffiths. This historical Interview is the Magazine's sixth. Lorenzo Lo Monte interviews Hugh
about his career and inspirations and shares with us all he learns. Hugh's career is impressive, full of achievements, discoveries, awards,
and honors. He regularly contributes historical articles to our magazine and as you will see when you read the interview, history and radar
continue to fascinate him. Although he acknowledges that radar is a mature technology, he reminds us that all you have to do is look around
at the conferences and journals on radar to see that there are "plenty of new things happening" and always something new to learn.
I hope you enjoy this issue, and I look forward to our next meeting.
-Peter Willett
OCTOBER 2017

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine October 2017