Good reasons for publishing in Minerals Engineering

When a researcher completes a programme of work, he or she presumably submits the ensuing paper to a journal of high repute with the highest professional standards.

Such standards are monitored by Elsevier via the Author Feedback Program, a continuous research program monitoring the performance of Elsevier's primary journals. It allows close monitoring of author opinion and thus journal performance. Authors are invited to rate a number of statements concerning their publishing experience. These statements are grouped into areas, including reputation, peer review, production speed, publishing services, the editorial board and impact factor.

Elsevier also asks the author to rate another journal in which they have recently published so that the score for each area for Minerals Engineering can be compared against the average of all other titles. The "average", which is a convenient benchmark, is zero on the chart shown on the left. Scores above zero mean, for that area, that Minerals Engineering is rated higher than average (scores above 5 place Minerals Engineering in the top third of all journals). Conversely, factor scores below zero, mean that Minerals Engineering would be rated lower than average (scores below -5 would place Minerals Engineering in the bottom third of journals).

The nine factor scores are weighted according to their importance, and used to calculate a composite journal score. This score is then compared to the journal scores of other journals in which the author also recently published, the maximum potential journal score being 100, but in general, scores vary between 50 and 90. Minerals Engineering scores 86.4 against an average of 75.7 with the percentage of authors who agree that they are very satisfied with the journal being 93%.

The feedback from Minerals Engineering authors is highly satisfying and I would like to thank my journal team, Dean Eastbury, Executive Publishing Manager, the Editorial Board, and over 400 reviewers who have given up their time to contribute to the peer-review process. As has been discussed previously, conscientious peer-review is essential in maintaining high standards and in 2011 a record 586 articles were submitted to the journal, of which 37% were published after review.