Minerals Engineering retains its number 1 position

It was good to catch up with Dean Eastbury, Executive Publishing Manager of Elsevier, at last month's Computational Modelling '15 conference in Falmouth. Joining us for our annual summer review of Minerals Engineering was Dr. Pablo Brito-Parada, of Imperial College, UK, recently appointed as Associate Editor of the journal. Pablo will be looking after the special issue of Computational Modelling, as well as November's Flotation '15 conference.

With Pablo and Dean in Falmouth

In terms of author satisfaction, the results of the Author Feedback Programme were very similar to the outstanding results reported last year (posting of 6th August 2014). Flow of papers to the journal continues to increase, with 829 papers submitted in 2014, compared with 739 in 2013. Papers from China show the largest increase, but unfortunately 88% of Chinese papers are rejected, which contributes markedly to the journal's current rejection rate of 73%. We are obviously still struggling a little to impress on prospective authors what constitutes a good journal paper, so I hope that Dean, Pablo, and IJMP's Kathryn Hadler will have a good turnout for their Authors' Workshop preceding Flotation '15 in November.

ScienceDirect downloads continue to increase and in 2014 passed half a million (530,537) for the first time, compared with 460,961 in 2013.

Impact Factor (IF) is important to many people, and although the 2014 IFs of the three Elsevier journals Hydrometallurgy, Minerals Engineering and International Journal of Mineral Processing fell compared with 2013, Minerals Engineering still retains its number 1 spot for mineral processing journals, and the gap between Minerals Engineering and the specialist Hydrometallurgy is closing.

The overall result is very pleasing and as always 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 Naveen Raja 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.