Before passing on a few reflections based on the strategic planning process going on at the IJFE, I want to say thank you to Dr. Pertti Harstela, one of our long standing Editorial Board members who is retiring from the Board. His experience and expertise have been a great asset to the Journal for many years and we are grateful for both.
We also are welcoming three new members to the Editorial Board: Dr. Antti Asikainen of the Finnish Forest Research Institute; Dr. Rolf Björheden of the School of Industrial Engineering at Växjö University in Sweden and Dr. Marvin Pyles, of the Forest Engineering Department at Oregon State University in the United States. All three are well known in the forest engineering community for the quality of their scholarship and we look forward to working with them in the future.
SHOULD WE PUBLISH THE IJFE?
The IJFE has been undergoing a strategic review and planning process over the last 18 months. As part of this review, we have been asking some fundamental questions about the Journal and its mission. In that context, the first and most important question to ask was "Should the IJFE exist?". The answer to this question determines whether we should continue to publish it and what features of the Journal's performance need to be monitored over time to ensure that publishing it continues to be a worthwhile activity. The following thoughts result from initial reflections on this basic question. Feedback from readers and contributors would be appreciated.
BENEFITS ACCRUING FROM PUBLICATION
The IJFE is primarily a scientific journal and, as such, will be considered valuable if it:
While these four are necessary conditions, they are nevertheless insufficient for us to conclude that the IJFE is worth publishing. To come to this latter conclusion we would also have to accept the following premises:
1) More and better scholarship leads to improvements in human and environmental welfare and is thus inherently worthwhile.
This is largely an article of faith in scholarly circles. While reasonable arguments can be made against (and for) some kinds of research (e.g., atomic weapons technology development, genetic engineering of food crops), there would likely be broad agreement in society that scholarship as a process is a worthwhile thing. While not losing sight of the fundamental ethical and social arguments about research and scholarship, we assume that there is benefit in scholarship and let the peer review process sort out the worthwhile work.
2) There is a sufficient amount of high quality scholarly work in forest engineering to justify maintaining a publication.
Since July 2000, the IJFE has received 74 manuscript submissions. Of these, 32 have already been accepted for publication (as of May, 2002) . The others have either been rejected (34) or are currently in the review process (8). At current rejection rates we need to receive approximately 35-40 publications per year to publish 2 volumes with 8 research papers each. We are currently sustaining this level in spite of the fact that we receive few manuscripts from some geographic areas where much scholarship is being produced (e.g., Canada, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and South America). With this untapped potential and current submission levels, we conclude that there is enough scholarship produced to justify the Journal's existence.
3) The peer review process as carried out by IJFE is effective at both screening out low value scholarship and helping scholars to improve their work.
Of the 66 manuscripts submitted to the IJFE since July 2000 for which reviews have been completed, 34 (53%) have been rejected. Of the papers rejected, one (3%) was on the grounds of not fitting with the Journal's scope and the remaining papers were rejected due to insufficient marginal contribution to warrant publication, poor communications, faulty scholarship or various combinations of these problems. Of these rejections, three papers were eventually resubmitted and accepted and three others resubmitted and rejected a second time. In light of these figures, there is clearly significant screening of low quality papers. This nevertheless leaves open the question of whether the papers actually published were sufficiently well screened. Continued subscriptions to the Journal by major university and research institute libraries and continued submission of manuscripts by authors implies that the scholarship published therein is likely with acceptable limits. However, this very important assumption needs to be tested explicitly through either reader surveys or citation statistics.
On the issue of whether the IJFE helps scholars improve the quality of their scholarship, we know that of the 32 papers accepted for publication since July 2000, 27 required substantive modifications to their initial manuscript to satisfy IJFE scientific and editorial reviewers. This implies that the IJFE review process helps at least 84% of authors improve the quality of their scholarly work.
4) That the Journal is actually read by scholars, practitioners and students.
Scholarship that is not read can have no impact on anyone but its creator. As a result, assessing the degree to which a publication is read and affects its field is very important. One of the normal means of assessing impact of a scientific publication is through the use of impact factors or citation indices. When they are interpreted appropriately for the size and nature of the field of scholarship, these indices provide valuable information about the degree to which a journal affects other scholars in the field. The IJFE is not currently listed with ISI, the organization that develops impact factors and citation indices, but inclusion will be sought in 2002. This will give us an indication of the degree to which other scholars cite the information in the Journal and thereby provide indicators of quality and readership.
Since impact factors rely on statistics about the rate at which people cite the journal in their own scholarly papers, it is not a helpful index of the impact of a publication on practitioners in a given field when these are not other scholars. Practising professionals rarely publish papers in scientific journals and the impact of a journal on their professional practice is therefore not recorded in citation indices. The same is true of students, particularly at undergraduate levels. As a result, citation indices provide no information on a journal's impact on these reader groups. This is an important shortcoming as the IJFE is a journal taking a scientific approach to an engineering field. As such, it addresses both a scholarly and professional audience. This poses some real challenges if the impact on professional and student audiences is to be assessed. Some proxies such as subscription rates among professionals, subscriber surveys and Web site hits by academic (`.edu') servers may be used, but each poses particular challenges. Finding a solution to this particular dilemma is one of the challenges he Journal will be facing in the next few years.
CONCLUSION
Our ANSWER to the fundamental question "Should the IJFE exist?" is that it should. There is a body of research to be published and the IJFE contributes substantially, both by filtering out low quality research and by improving manuscripts is receives. We also conclude that we need to make a major effort to assess the impact it has on the readership it targets, particularly among students and professional practitioners of forest engineering. Finding efficient and effective means of assessing impact will be a major challenge for the Journal in the short to medium term.
Pierre Zundel
Managing Editor