Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine June 2017 - 3

From the Associate Editor-in-Chief
JUNE 2017

DOI. No. 10.1109/MAES.2017.176001

I

'm at one of the three main annual IEEE volunteer/staff meetings, this one (as so many are) in picturesque
central New Jersey. A topic of interest here is "citation stacking." I'm guessing that many of you don't
know what that is, so let me give a short course in it.
Many publications measure themselves in terms of the "Impact Factor" (IF), which for a given publication is the average number of times each article gets cited over a rolling two-year period. That is, suppose a
journal publishes monthly and has 10 articles per issue, and the year's 120 articles get cited 500 times in total
- but (say) only 180 over the first two years. Then the IF is 1.50: the 180 count toward the IF, the other (later)
320 don't count for IF, although they do count towards other bibliometrics, for example journal "half-life".
But IF gets a lot of attention. A high IF can be good, it should mean that a journal is publishing important things. Sometimes editors (and authors) are judged by IF. But misuse, misapplication, and gaming of
bibliometrics are real concerns for IEEE and all of us ... I'll write more about that in a coming issue. How
does editor Donald game IF? One way is to force prospective authors to cite recent articles from Donald's
own publication. This can appear as "self-citation" and is relatively easy to adjust for. A subtler approach
Peter Willett
is to form a "cartel" of allied publications that (again) force citations from authors; but this time Donald's
publication cites articles from Daisy's, while Daisy returns the favor and cites Donald. Get the idea? By the
way, author cartels are not unknown either: academics can be judged by their citations (and Hirsch index). So Professor Huey agrees to cite
Dr. Dewey and Dean Louie; Dewey cites Huey and ... well, you get the idea. Yes, academics can be as sneaky as anyone. Big surprise.
So, what does citation stacking look like? Consider this fragment, from a rejection letter at a publication that you probably don't know
and which will stay nameless:
"By reviewing your article, there is only one reference from [journal name]. The insufficient literature review and references
indicates that the paper's literature positioning is difficult and unclear to attract the readership. In addition, it will be very difficult for an AE to identify proper reviewers for your paper. Therefore, your paper is unsubmitted or transferred. We suggest
that the number of reference papers from [journal name] should not less than 3."
That is, parsed a bit and stripped of its pseudo-reasonableness: Cite my [journal name] and help my IF, or else find somewhere else to publish.
Not good. I'll discuss this more when next we meet.
But for now on to a nicer topic, the technical content to follow. This month we have an issue with its regular articles focused upwards.
C

C

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A team from Lithuania has contributed an in-depth article on QB50, a program whereby 50 cubesats (each quite small, 30x10x10cm)
are to be deployed to work as a "satellite network" team for atmospheric observation.
Testing of spacecraft attitude determination under realistic in-orbit conditions is difficult; authors from Iran tell us of a testbed they
have developed for that purpose.
Data communications for space systems is especially difficult due to the links' asymmetry, the low SNR, the high Doppler shifts and
the long distances. A group from Italy has given us a survey of emerging and future digital receiver chains: decoding, demodulation
and synchronization.
Researchers from Wright-Patterson and Ohio University tell us the effects of geo-registration of WAMI (wide-area motion imagery),
with special attention to losses from compression and resampling.

We also have two feature pieces. One is a Student Highlight (we'd like more of these!) from Texas A&M on quadcopter control. And we
have a Historical Article from Czekala and Samczynski detailing the significant contributions to modern radar theory and practice that have
come from Poland. By its nature the piece focuses on the past, 1970 and earlier. I'll urge our readers to take a close look at this one: we, in the
West, did not have much news of Soviet-bloc technological developments in the years prior to the Wall's fall. And these were smart people.
Regards,
Peter Willett

JUNE 2017

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

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

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