Editorial

Citation

Campbell, I. (2014), "Editorial", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/RPJ-05-2014-0064

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Rapid Prototyping Journal, Volume 20, Issue 4

Yesterday, I had an extremely interesting conversation with one of the staff at Emerald, the publisher of the Rapid Prototyping Journal (RPJ). We reviewed the progress the journal has made over the past few years and discussed ideas for improving our offering in the future.

In terms of the review, there were a number of very significant and encouraging statistics about the usage of the journal, which I would like to share with you. First, our Impact Factor for 2012 remained almost unchanged at a respectable 1.000. We know that this is an important indicator of journal quality for many authors, and we will be striving to publicise this to as many potential authors as possible. Usage of the journal (as measured by downloaded articles) is steadily rising, with almost 75,000 downloads in 2013. This shows that your papers are being read by numerous researchers around the globe. In particular, it is worth noting that researchers in China now download more articles than anywhere else, followed by the USA, the UK and Germany. This reflects the increasing prominence of Additive Manufacturing (AM) research in that country. As for the source of papers submitted to the RPJ, India, China and the USA account for over 40 per cent of submissions, again reflecting the importance of AM research in these countries. Early indications for 2014 show a marked increase in the rate of both submissions and downloads, indicating that AM research is flourishing and that researchers are increasingly seeing the RPJ as a valuable resource for their work. I hope that this information will encourage you to keep reading the RPJ and to consider us when wishing to disseminate your work.

Despite these positive signs, we are not complacent and so we have identified a number of things we will be doing to serve our customers better in the future. First, we will be introducing more themed Special Issues, where all the papers will relate to a particular aspect of AM. The first of these will be published early in 2015 with the title “Entry level additive manufacturing”. The guest editor will be Dr Eujin Pei from De Montfort University in the UK, a pioneer researcher in this area. Special Issues are a way of addressing those aspects of AM that the editorial team regard as particularly pertinent. Another key area where we are seeking to improve is for a quicker turnaround time for papers, both in review and between acceptance and publication. Several strategies will be adopted to achieve this key goal, including an increase in the number of papers published in each issue. We will also be asking authors to suggest referees who would be qualified to review their paper. There is no guarantee that the paper will actually be assigned to them, but it will certainly help us to build up our database of experts in the field.

So then, in this our twentieth year, the RPJ team is as committed as ever to continuous improvement of our offering and service, striving to make RPJ the journal of choice, when it comes to publishing AM and 3D Printing research.

Ian Campbell