Applied Computing and Intelligence: A new open access journal

1.   Introduction

The journal was founded in 2021 to match the increasing importance of computing, artificial intelligence, and their many applications. This is now our fourth year of operation. We have successfully created a forum to publish novel research papers in the research areas of applied computing and intelligence, but the journal is still in the early stages.

During the years 2021-2023, we received 120 submissions of which 23 (5+10+8) have been published, 61 rejected, and 33 withdrawn (due to being duplicate submissions or withdrawn by the authors). Two papers were still in the process at the end of 2023.

Most of the submissions have been handled by the editors-in-chief to set the standards for the journal. Many submissions were rejected directly without any review. The most common reasons for a desk rejection have been low quality writing making it difficult, or even impossible to use or reproduce the results. Authors were given reasonable chances to improve whenever the writing was a bottleneck.

Papers that passed the editorial check were assigned by three or more independent reviewers, either editorial board members or external experts on the topic.

The journal has 46 editorial board members coming from 17 countries in 6 continents. Most reside in Europe (13), USA (10), China (10), and Australia (8). There are three editors-in-chief (EiC), 11 senior editors (SE), 30 associate editors (AE), and three advisory panel chairs. Editors-in-chief take care of all submissions and allocate them to the most appropriate editor to handle the paper. The handling editor can be EiC, SE, or AE. The geographical coverage of the editors is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.  Geographical distribution of the editorial board covering all six contents.

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2.   Published papers during 2021-2023

The published articles have authors from 13 countries: Australia, China, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Tunisia, United Kingdom, and United States.

Based on the keywords from the papers, the most common research areas are machine learning, classification, and clustering. Based on singular word counts, the most common themes are learning, classification, detection, mining, and clustering. A word cloud of these is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.  Word cloud of research topics covered by the papers.

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The dates of the submitted papers are shown on the timeline in Figure 3 with the days taken from submission to acceptance. On average, it took 69 days for acceptance (including revision rounds), and 10 days from acceptance decision to publication date. The fastest paper took only 4 days and the longest 195 days.

Figure 3.  Timeline of the submissions during 2021-2023. Accepted papers are shown in red and rejected/withdrawn papers by gray. The numbers are days from the submission to the acceptance decision. The average times (days) in each year were 36 (2021), 60 (2022), and 102 (2023).

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Overall statistics from the first three years are summarized in Table 1. In total, 23 (19%) of all the submitted papers have been accepted for publication. The acceptance rate was highest in 2021 (31%) and lowest in 2023 (12%).

Table 1.  Annual statistics of the papers in 2021-2023. Acceptance rate is the percentage of the published papers among the submitted papers in the database. The average time is counted from the submission to publication. The number of published papers is counted based on the publication year (which may be different than the submission year).

Year	Submissions	Acceptance rate	Published	Average Time
2021	16	31%	5	36
2022	55	22%	10	60
2023	49	12%	8	102

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3.   Impact of the papers

Based on the access counts (April 1^st, 2024), the papers published in 2022 have been read 1671 times, on average. These compare well with the numbers reported by similar journals (Applied Intelligence, Applied Sciences) in their first issue of 2022 (803 and 2019 based on random sampling).

The most read paper in the journal is the paper by Yang et al. ^[1] with 3659 read. The topics of the most read papers in each volume are the following:

● 2021, issue 1: Intrusion detection (2654) ^[2]

● 2022, issue 1: Zero-shot classification (3659) ^[1]

● 2022, issue 2: Faulty traffic data detection (1536) ^[3]

● 2023: issue 1: Algorithmic composition of music (1511) ^[4]

● 2023: issue 2: Truss structure optimization (701) ^[5]

Seven of the papers have been cited. The first-ever paper published in the journal ^[6] has been cited twice, the others once. These are modest numbers, and the future will show how the impact will develop when the journal becomes indexed.

4.   Journal standards

Journal standards can be summarized by the following three criteria:

● Novel contribution

● Validity of methods and results

● Clarity of presentation and reproducibility

A paper must have some novel (previously unpublished) contribution by the authors. The content must be flawless, and the methods and results must be clearly documented. The lack of this has been the major reason for rejections so far. The reader must be able to verify, reproduce, and apply with reasonable effort.

A good paper will have an impact, but seeking a high impact factor is not our primary goal. The journal provides a forum for all well-prepared novel contributions. The expected impact is not an acceptance criterion. Instead, we will leave the significance to the readers to decide. Fake results and fraudulent papers should be detected (and rejected) to guarantee the trustworthiness of the journal. The clarity of presentation is the next biggest factor. We welcome your new submissions!

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest in this paper.