Making impact

The year 2022 was a year of many groundbreaking changes. And once again, the pandemic was a major challenge. Nevertheless, the conference season was very intense. Most researchers took advantage of August and September to attend one or probably several such meetings to exchange ideas with colleagues, learn about the latest research, or make new contacts. This was so much needed.

For Advanced Optical Technologies, the year was difficult, too. COVID has halted the communication between editors and the community and so, the number of submissions dropped. Thanks to recent efforts this trend is stopped, several topical issues are announced for 2023 and the manuscript flow has just picked up.

This will be accompanied by some very good news: AOT will receive an Impact Factor in 2023. For a journal with a focus on industry-related research this has not been a top priority, but Clarivate, the issuer of the Journal Citation Report, has announced on July 26, “that in the 2023 release of the Journal Citation Reports all Web of Science Core Collection™ journals will receive a Journal Impact Factor (JIF)™. This means expanding the JIF from Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)™ and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)™ to include journals from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI)™ and the multidisciplinary Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)™.” [1] A very good discussion of this event can be found in “The scholarly kitchen”, a well esteemed blog on scholarly publishing, on July 26, 2022 [2].

AOT has been listed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index for quite some time already, and so, it will make it to the JCR and receive an impact factor in summer 2023 for the journal year 2022. For those who are not aware of the definition of the JIF: “The annual JCR impact factor is a ratio between citations and recent citable items published. Thus, the impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years” [3].

The JIF is well distinguished from other metrics such as the CiteScore from Elsevier’s scopus site. The CiteScore refers to citations from four years referring to publications within the same four years. The CiteScore 2021 for AOT is 2.8, with good chances to rise in 2022. In a rough estimation, the JIF can be expected at about 80–90% of the CiteScore. For AOT this gives hope for an initial JIF between 2 and 3.

This is good news and fits well into the long-term strategy of changing the journal towards more academic contributions and more Open Access publications. Already now, AOT authors deliver outstanding contributions. Publications such as “Smartphone imaging technology and its applications” from Vladan Blahnik and Oliver Schindelbeck, to name just one example, are truly unique.

More content of this type has been announced for 2023. As publisher, I am pleased that the journal is growing again, and I look forward to making the authors’ experience as positive as possible.

Andreas Thoss

Publisher

Advanced Optical Technologies