Great news for Minerals Engineering

The 2013 Journal Impact Factors have been published, and I am pleased to see that Minerals Engineering is once more the highest ranked mineral processing journal, being second only to Elsevier's specialised journal Hydrometallurgy.

I am not exactly dancing for joy at this news, however, as I have never been a great fan of the capricious impact factor ranking, although I know it is of great importance to many academics. A more important guide for me is journal usage, the number of downloads that journal papers receive on ScienceDirect, and for Minerals Engineering, that is truly enormous. In 2013 a record 260 papers were published (compared with 212 in 2012) and there was also a record number of downloads from ScienceDirect, 460,961, the most downloaded paper in 2013 being A review of the beneficiation of rare earth element bearing minerals (Jordens, A.; Cheng, Y.P.; Waters, K.E.). The journal's rejection rate in 2013 was 63%.

What I am particularly pleased with is the figure below, which benchmarks the journal's performance on the basis of feedback from the most important people who contribute to the journal's success, the authors.

The Author Feedback Program is a continuous research program monitoring the performance of Elsevier's primary journals. It allows Elsevier to closely monitor 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 each author to rate another journal in which they have recently published.  The score for each area for Minerals Engineering is then compared against the average of all other titles. The "average", which is a convenient benchmark, is zero on the chart. Scores above zero mean, for that area, that Minerals Engineering is rated higher than average. Conversely, factor scores below zero, mean for that area, Minerals Engineering is rated lower than average.  The order in which the factors appear in the chart denote their importance to authors (i.e. the first factor listed is, on average, the most important consideration when deciding where to publish for the authors of the journal).

The overall result is impressive and I would like to take this opportunity of thanking all those who work with me to maintain Minerals Engineering's consistently high standard; the Editorial Board, supplemented by around 275 reviewers, who give up their valuable time to contribute to the peer-review process, my excellent Publishing Manager at Elsevier, Dean Eastbury and his very helpful team, particularly Divya Kaliyaperumal who deals patiently with all production problems, and last but by no means least, all the authors who submit their valuable research work to the journal and the associated MEI Conferences.