EDITORIAL

 

Note from the editor

 

 

"Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good. "

- Elizabeth Edwards

At the end of 2021, I noted that the journal had a good year despite COVID's impact for 2 years. In December 2021, we had limited lockdowns again due to the Omnicron variant, but throughout 2022, COVID's immediate threat disappeared, and new challenges arose. In South Africa, the economic fall-out from COVID, poor governance and political instability as well as the local electricity supplier's failure to provide sufficient electricity for our economy, has been demanding a lot of attention. But, we as Industrial Engineering Professionals had again shown how resilient we are, with one of the biggest local conferences ever in October.

As mentioned at the end of 2017, it is now customary to evaluate how the journal is performing. Scopus (www.scopus.com) measures impact with a "CiteScore" and the graph in Figure 1 (extracted from Scopus on 13 December 2022) shows the progress made over the last five years. The CiteScore for a year is calculated as the Citation Count for the year / number of documents published in the previous three years. The Citescore for 2020 was 1.3 (measured May 2021), and the Citescore for 2021 is slightly lower at 1.2. Our ranking with respect to the Percentile in the category, is currently stable as a Q3 journal.

 

 

Another important source for journal standing, is Scimago Journal and Country Rank (www.scimagojr.com), where the journal is also listed as a Q3 journal in the "Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering" subject area. It is very encouraging to observe how the number of citations had been growing (Figure 2).

 

 

This edition has a total of 12 articles, with 8 from authors with South African connections and the balance from international authors.

In time for the 3^rd (special) edition, we appointed a new Technical Editor, Mr Eldon Burger. Eldon was thrown into the deep end, doing the technical editing on the 3^rd and final edition of the year at a very busy time. Well done Eldon!

We also appointed a new Section Editor, who will be managing the editorial process for Operations Research, and other Quantitative Management, and Data Science related articles. She is Dr Wilna Bean, from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

If you have suggestions on how we can take this journal forward, please let me know.

Corne Schutte

Editor