Editorial

The Editor invites the signal processing research community to actively consider submitting a proposal for an IEEE J-STSP (IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing) issue. J-STSP is published bimonthly and comprises of carefully reviewed papers that are submitted in response to a specific Call-for-Papers. We need exciting high-quality proposals and papers from you to ensure the success of the journal. Special issues published by J-STSP can serve as a seminal scholarly reference to state-of-the-art research, particularly in emerging multidisciplinary areas of signal processing. Indeed, due to the careful review process, the prestige of the IEEE, the wide accessibility of IEEE journals, and the relatively quick turn-around time, such special issues have the potential to achieve a very high impact compared to multi-chapter edited books. The Editor also raises the following challenge: How can we make J-STSP a high-impact engineering journal? Given that J-STSP is only three years old, it does not have a documented impact factor yet. While we have traditionally not been concerned with impact factor, we need to be more cognizant of its role. Given that many of the high-impact results of the future will lie at the boundaries of multidisciplinary areas, we need to ensure that journals such as J-STSP are well respected by researchers outside the traditional areas of electrical engineering. As authors, we must broaden the appeal of our papers to other research communities.We need papers in our journals to be cited more often both by our community and other research communities.We also need to broaden the appeal of our special issues so as to actively engage industry - to collaborate with them in formulating proposals for special issues, to coauthor papers with colleagues in industry, and to broaden the appeal of our papers to facilitate technology transfer.