PR Letters

Pattern Recognition Letters aims at rapid publication of concise articles of broad interest in pattern recognition. Subject areas include all the current fields of interest represented by the Technical Committees of the International Association of Pattern Recognition, and other developing themes involving learning and recognition.

The current state of the journal is excellent. It is continuing on the positive trend that was set by Prof. Tin Kam Ho, who handed the EiC reigns for regular papers to Profs. Gunilla Borgefors and Sudeep Sarkar in 2011. Dr. Gabriella Sanniti di Baja continues to be the EiC for special issues. Over the last year, PR Letters has continued on an upwards trajectory. In the year 2011, more than 1000 articles were submitted, compared to about 900 in 2010. Selectivity has also increased; in 2011 the acceptance rate was around 29%, a decrease of 6% from 2010.

The editorial board consists of 49 associate editors and 4 area editors, who handle papers in high volume subareas in pattern recognition. This diverse board of enthusiastic and dedicated experts has helped keep the review pipeline moving. As an author, the following statistics, derived from last half of 2011, would be of interest.

Time to first decision from submission: 18 weeks (26 weeks in 2010).

Time to final decision from submission: 30 weeks (38 weeks in 2010).

These demonstrate the excellent job that the board and you, as reviewers, are doing. We are sure they have called upon many of you to review. We hope you will continue to do so.

We would like to share with you some good news. We are pleased to report that the following paper was the most two-year cited paper in 2011 and will receive the 2012 Most Cited Paper Award for Pattern Recognition Letters

Jain, A.K., Data clustering: 50 years beyond K-means (2010) Pattern Recognition Letters 31 (8), Special Issue "Award Winning Papers from the 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition ", pp. 651-666 (dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2009.09.011)

Prof. Jain was the recipient of the K. S. Fu award in 2008.

The paper with the most citations for a five-year period ending in 2011 was

Wang, X., Yang, J., Teng, X., Xia, W., Jensen, R. Feature selection based on rough sets and particle swarm optimization (2007) Pattern Recognition Letters, 28 (4), pp. 459-471. (dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2006.09.003)

The Scopus1000 Award, in recognition of having received over 1,000 citations to date for contribution published in Pattern Recognition Letters goes to

Fawcett, T. An introduction to ROC analysis (2006) Pattern Recognition Letters, 27 (8), Special Issue "ROC Analysis in Pattern Recognition", pp. 861-874 ( dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2005.10.010). Cited 1125 times.

We invite you to see the most downloaded and most cited articles at

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/pattern-recognition-letters/

Information about upcoming special issues also appears there.

In closing we invite you to communicate to us any critical review of the journal that will help make the journal better.

by the Editors-in-Chief:

Gunilla Borgefors, IAPR Fellow (Sweden)

Gabriella Sanniti di Baja, IAPR Fellow (Italy)

Sudeep Sarkar, IAPR Fellow (USA)