EDITORIAL

 

Editorial: The international issue

 

 

Katharine M. Malan

Department of Decision Sciences, University of South Africa. sacj.editor@gmail.com

 

 

In this issue

We start SACJ volume 37, issue 2, with tributes to the lives of two distinguished academics in the SACJ community, Prof André van der Poll and Prof Derek Smith. With obituaries from colleagues, we celebrate their lives and significant contributions to both the Computer Science and Information Systems communities of South Africa. They will be sorely missed.

The research in this issue is distinguished from previous issues of SACJ in the high number of research articles from international scholars. Of the five research articles, only two are from South African authors, with the other three articles from Eswatini, Bangladesh and Iraq.

The first research article by Naudé and Kroeze is a bibliographic analysis of SACJ spanning 45 years, providing interesting insights on publication numbers, citation count and co-authorship trends over 45 years of SACJ's history. To quote from the conclusion: "SACJ has played a pivotal role in developing and disseminating computing knowledge in South Africa." With this 'international issue', we see the role of SACJ expanding beyond the borders of South Africa. We welcome our new international authors.

The research papers included in this issue are:

• A 45-year review of the South African Computer Journal (1979-2023) by Naudé and Kroeze.

• Investigating the support of proprioception and visual guidance for menu selection in virtual reality by Ka, Bosman, and Bothma.

• Improving greybox fuzzing with dictionary-based mutations: A systematic literature review by Dube, Akinnuwesi, Fashoto, Mashwama, and Tsabedze.

• WeaveChain: A decentralized storage framework using Arweave to address scalability, security, and decentralization challenges by Reno.

• Reinforcement Learning algorithms for adaptive load-balancing for Web applications by Al-Shaikh, Al-Nayar, and Hasan.

Submission statistics

For information, we present the following updated statistics around submissions, acceptance rates and the processing time of articles.

 

 

The figures above translate into an overall rejection rate of approximately 87%. This high rejection rate can be attributed to the large number of submissions from all over the world due to the indexing of SACJ on Scopus. To quantify the reach of SACJ, between 1 January and 20 December 2025 we received 116 submissions from 27 different countries (36 from South Africa, 25 from other African countries, and 55 from outside Africa).

Similar to SACJ, South African Journal of Science reported a rejection rate of 82% in 2024. In terms of submission processing time, the median time to a first decision (desk reject / send to review) since 2023 was 2 days and the median time to final decision for submissions sent to review was 5 months.

Thank you to all authors for submitting your manuscripts to SACJ and for entrusting us with your research. Thank you also to the editorial team for all your work behind the scenes and to the many reviewers who support our journal.