IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2010 - 95

E D I T O R ' S

CORNER

Scientific Publishing

n important part of life for those of us who are students
or academics is scientific publishing. Our field is served
by a number of high-quality journals in addition to
magazines. Although there is some rivalry between these publications, we are united by a common concern about the quality of scholarship in our community.
At the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation 2010, I had an opportunity to meet, as the new
kid on the block, my fellow editors-in-chief: Seth Hutchinson (IEEE Transactions on Robotics), John Hollerbach (International Journal of Robotics Research), Sanjiv Singh (Journal of
Field Robotics), Gaurav Sukhatme (Autonomous Robots), and
Nukala Viswanadham (IEEE Transactions on Automation Science
and Engineering).
The editors-in-chief and the publishers of journals are
vitally concerned about something called impact factor (IF).
The IF for a journal in 2009 is calculated by: IF ¼ A/B, where
A is the number of times articles published by the journal in
2006-2007 were cited by publications in 2008, and B is the
number of citeable articles published by the journal in 2006-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2010.938503

2007. It is a simple formula, and like it or not, it is used as a
proxy for the quality of journals.
However, this is not just a concern for the editors-in-chief.
You as a scientific publisher should also care because the IF for
the journal you publish in is a proxy for your quality as a
researcher. In our field, the top-ranked publication's IF was
3.00 last year. In the life sciences, the number might be an
order of magnitude higher. At promotion time in a university,
this could be a consideration.
There are a number of other issues that we all should care
about. The etiquette of publishing is unwritten and perhaps
less well understood. Plagiarism in all its forms is on the rise,
papers are being submitted to multiple conferences or journals
at the same time, and there are more and more papers that
require review.
In future issues of the magazine, we will use this column to
discuss these issues. We will also cover topics such as how to
write abstracts, how to properly use keywords, what does it
mean to extend a conference paper to a journal paper, and
how to review papers. I invite any members of the community
who have an interest in these matters to contact the editor-inchief with a proposal for a future column.

E R R A T A

n the article "Advanced E-Manufacturing Model" by FanTien Cheng, Wen-Huang Tsai, Tsung-Li Wang, Jonathan
Chang Yung-Cheng, and Yu-Chuan Su in the March
2010 issue of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (vol. 17,
no. 1, pp. 71-84), the credit lines for Figures 1-4 were incorrect. The correct credit lines are as follows.
u Figure 1. The advanced e-manufacturing model.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2010.938504

SEPTEMBER 2010

Figure 2. An e-manufacturing model for unmet needs
[17]. ERP: enterprise resource planning; EAM: enterprise
asset management. (From [17]. Used with permission.)
Figure 3. ISMT e-manufacturing hierarchy [4]. AMHS:
automated material handling system. [Courtesy of International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI).]
Figure 4. An e-manufacturing structure for the semiconductor industry [21]. ERP: enterprise resource planning;
AMHS: automated material handling system. (From [21].)

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