Discussion on Who Are the Readers of PWRD Papers
PWRD editorial board welcomes the suggestions, comments, and feedback from the reader, author and reviewer community of PWRD. Please send your comments to EIC or editors. Comments of general interest to the community will be posted here (with the agreement of the writer and with minor editing to hide information that may identify the writer). If applicable, responses will be included as well.
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An important question should be answered by the editors: What readers are addressed by the IEEE Transactions Vol PWRD?
Traditionally the following user groups were identified: Power transmission and distribution utility engineers, HV Power apparatus and transformer design, manufacturing and testing engineers, employees of research centers on electric power belonging to utilities and manufacturers as well as national reference institutions, consultants and suppliers of HV test and measuring equipment.
University teaching staff and graduate students have always been keen readers and prolific contributors, but their motivation has often been determined by the “publish or perish” rule.
The changing times must have changed this traditional choice of readers. The latter group dominates the former ones, and the profile of our PWRD Transactions has to reflect the modern times.
It would be appreciated by the reviewers if a clear answer to this question could be prepared by the Editors and announced.
EIC Response: Thanks for the thoughtful email. I suspect that university researchers are a significant reader group of PWRD. Each person of this group may read many papers.
Industry readers of PWRD do exist. The majority of graduate students of power programs enters industry. They read various materials to help their jobs of non-routine nature. Some engineers with undergraduate degrees also read papers. Each person of this group may not read many papers but the population of this group is large. (This group finds papers typically using google search. With the upcoming green open access, I expect many of them will be able to read PWRD papers of two years older more easily.) Among this group, people working in R&D centers and consulting companies seem to read many papers.
Based on the above educated guess and in view that the majority of PES members are from industry, I believe the characteristics of PWRD readers have not changed a lot. However, the characteristics of the authors do. This is one of the factors leading to rubrics based review scheme.
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Good points are raised above, I can comment on two different underlying issues. The list of readers is unsurprising and I think well known.
1) Research papers versus applications oriented papers.
Some readers will read both types or articles but many will only read either research papers or those oriented towards practical applications, commonly written by industry. It should be acknowledged that there is big difference between these two groups of articles.
You might know that in the control systems society they have two different journals: transactions on automatic control (more theory and research focused) and transactions on control systems applications (oriented towards practicing control engineers).
It is suitable to publish together all papers as we do in TPWRD. I believe however that it might be beneficial to label papers as either research or applications. This can be done as an example by segmenting the table of contents. This might be of help in building identity of the journal and in connecting with some marginal readership groups.
2) Publish or perish. This is a problem in Academia and also with journals. I would imagine, as XXXX alludes, and as EIC comments, that the publish or perish culture has led to more academic authors in TPWRD. Industry does not publish more than before. It is not good if there is significant unbalance (industry/academia) of authors since this will have impact on readership. It would be interesting to know if research papers are read more than applications papers. The “publish or perish” culture is around 20 years old, the number of publications has been increasing but I do not think that it has much increased quality of research, if at all. Overall the publish or perish culture has made negative impact, in my view.
EIC comments: I believe PWRD needs both types of papers. In addition to meeting the reader needs, the application papers can “pull” the research papers to their proper track. Without such an influence, I can imagine a journal could evolve eventually into a purely academic journal like the IEEE Trans. on XXXX. Similarly, the research papers can raise the standards for application papers.
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I do not have the time at the moment to engage, but here are a few thoughts for whatever they are worth:
· Why is it so difficult or important to know who is reading PWRD? If we have a question that we want to get answered that creates an actionable future effort, I would suggest we run a survey. Are we are going to know what to do once we know who is reading it the way the discussion is going? Designing a survey would need to be a much more thoughtful process.
· The differentiation between practical and theoretical papers is superficial unless we have clear criteria. Do we? In my 450 papers published so far I would have a difficulty designating in many cases what is theoretical and what is practical. It depends obviously on what the user can make out of the published material.
· The most important issues, that should not be skewed with anything else is the QUALITY of publications, which in my judgement is going down dramatically. I do not have much time to review papers any more, but when I do it, my decisions in most cases is a rejection or re-write. We really need to do something about improving the review process, and that is tough
I am not sure I added anything new, but just felt I need to share my thoughts since the discussions seem to be “all over the place”. Regards,