I am delighted to report that VTS publications have been doing well in servicing the technical community. 

Both our two main journals, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT) and IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine (VTM), provide a high quality and high impact venue for the researchers and engineers to publish new studies in the latest R&D frontier.

As a popular numeric metric of journal citations, the impact factor is calculated as the number of citations to the journal divided by the number of papers published in the journal over a period of the two most recent years.

In June 2019, the Web of Science published the new InCites Journal Citations Reports, which shows that both TVT and VTM have reached to a new height in terms of the impact factor in 2018: 5.339 for TVT (from 4.432 in 2017) and 6.145 for VTM (from 6.038 in 2017).

The following two figures show the journal impact factors in the past five years. On behalf of the VTS Board of Governors, I would like to congratulate the TVT Editor-in-Chief (EiC) Dr. Nei Kato, and the former and current VTM EiCs Klaus David and Javier Gozálvez. We also thank their editorial teams for these great achievements!

Figure 1. TVT impact factor trend, 2014—2018

Figure 2. VTM impact factor trend, 2014—2018

The numbers of paper submissions to both TVT and VTM continue to increase significantly. We received 3349 submissions in 2018 to TVT, an increase of more than 30 percent from the 2572 submissions in 2017.

A similar trend is observed in IEEE Xplore downloads. In 2018, TVT had 996,549 paper downloads (from 918,836 in 2017), and is ranked the top 14th among all IEEE publications.

VTM Editor-in-Chief Javier Gozálvez has been working diligently since July 2018 to grow and enhance the popular magazine by streamlining the editorial process, providing guidance to both authors and editors, and organizing special issues in Autonomous/Electric/Connected (ACE) Vehicles and in 5G and Beyond Communication Systems. Thanks to the strong support from the VTS Board of Governors and to the outstanding leadership of our EiCs, currently both journals have no publication backlog.

Last but not least, VTS is launching a new journal, IEEE Open Journal of Vehicular Technology (OJVT). It is my great pleasure to introduce our first EiC of the journal, Dr. Sumei Sun. Dr. Sun is currently the Head of Communications and Networks Cluster, and Lead Principal Investigator of the Industrial Internet of Things Research Program at the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore.

Dr. Sun is an IEEE Fellow and a VTS Distinguished Speaker. She served as a TVT Area Editor, an Editor of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, and a member of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications Steering Committee. With her strong commitment to the OJVT leadership position, we will see many initiatives to grow the journal and increase its impact.

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