EDITORIAL

 

Editorial: Back to good health

 

 

Philip Machanick

Department of Computer Science, Rhodes University, South Africa. sacj.editor@gmail.com

 

 

Introduction

We have a bumper issue, with eleven research papers and one letter to the editor. 2016 was a difficult year for academia in South Africa with highly disruptive protests. 2017 was mostly better from that point of view, though the protest movement has not completely gone away. This issue contains some papers that were submissions to special issues that were not ready in time and hence to some extent is a catch-up issue.

In previous issues this year, 29(1), published in July, contained nine research papers, of which five were extended papers from the 2016 SAICSIT annual conference. There was also a special issue on ICT in Education published in October, 29(2), which had five research papers. Two papers from the ICT in Education special issue spilled over to this issue.

Overall, we have published 25 research papers this year, compared with four in 2016, fourteen in 2015 and nineteen in 2014. Numbers are therefore looking healthy again; I hope the underlying causes of protest are addressed so we do not have to endure another year like 2016.

In the remainder of this editorial, I give an update on the effects of indexing in Scopus, list papers in this issue and end with changes in the editorial team.

 

Scopus indexing impact

SACJ has been indexed by Scopus since 2016 and is now starting to accumulate citation statistics. It will be a while before those statistics are sufficient to be interesting.

Being listed on Scopus has already resulted in a increase in interest from international authors including two proposals from India to submit a high number of conference papers. We do not have capacity to deal with such large-scale requests (in one case, 100 or more papers per year) while maintaining quality. Even with the number of submissions we do have, finding reviewers is an ongoing challenge.

Nonetheless I hope that this raised profile will in time attract authors from a wider catchment. In particular, SACJ welcomes articles from authors trying to break into quality publication, particularly from developing countries.

 

In this issue

Since this is an lengthy issue, I only list authors and titles, rather than a short synopsis of each paper.

• Basitere and Ivala: "Evaluation of an adaptive learning technology in a first-year Extended Curriculum Programme physics course"¹

• Cilliers and Flowerday: "Factors that influence the usability of a participatory IVR crowdsourcing system in a smart city"

• Coleman and Mtshazi: "Factors affecting the use and non-use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) by academic staff"¹

• Kola and Velempini: "A model to improve the routing performance of Cognitive Radio Wireless Mesh Networks"

• Mabakane, Moeketsi and Lopis: "Scalability of DL_POLY on High Performance Computing platform"

• Padayachee: "Educator perceptions of virtual learning system quality Characteristics"

• Renaud and Van Biljon: "Demarcating mobile phone interface design guidelines to expedite selection"²

• Sakpere, Adeyeye-Oshin and Mlitwa: "A state-of-the-art survey of indoor positioning and navigation systems and technologies"

• Smith and Wells: "Interprocess communication with Java in a Microsoft Windows environment"

• Twinomurinzi, Schoefield, Hagen, Molefe and Tshidzumba: "Towards a shared worldview on e-skills: A discourse between government, industry and academia on the ICT skills paradox"

• Winberg, Naidoo and Ramone: "Accelerating computer-based recognition of fynbos leaves Using a Graphics Processing Unit"

We also have a letter to the editor reporting on the SACLA 2017 conference.

 

Transitions and thanks

I would like to bid farewell to Martin Olivier whom we lost from the editorial team and welcome Suna Bensch who joined us earlier this year.

SACJ relies heavily on the voluntary efforts of our editors and reviewers without whom we would not be able to publish quality issues on a regular schedule. Production editor James Dibley continues to do excellent work, ensuring that the finished article is of a high standard of presentation. Thank you all of you.

 

 

1 Originally submitted for the special issue on ICT for Education (vol. 29 no. 2).
2 Originally submitted for the SAICSIT 2016 extended papers special section in vol. 29 no. 1.