NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

• Corne Schutte Editor: SAJIE Department of Industrial Engineering, Stellenbosch University http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0119-720X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7166/30-4-2298

Abstract

“The two most joyous times of the year are Christmas morning and the end of school” - Alice Cooper

The journal once again experienced a very successful year, and it is wonderful to start the festive season on this note! It is thus a pleasure to write this as my last official duty in 2019. The South African academic year is finished, Christmas is in two weeks, and the country is shutting down for the holiday period, with our local electricity provider, Eskom, actively assisting in the shutdown process!

Fig 1 Scopus CiteScore

As initiated 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 10 December 2019) shows the progress made over the last few years. The CiteScore for a year is calculated as Citation Count for the year divided by the number of documents published in the previous 3 years. I reported a year ago that we were seeing a temporary negative trend with the expansion to more editions. As you can see from the graph, we had turned the trend around, and the CiteScore index is now the highest ever, with the interim CiteScore for 2018, as updated on 12 November, at 0,78. Our ranking with regard to the Percentile in the category is also again improving, and hopefully we will become a Q2 journal in 2020. 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 have been growing (Fig 2).

Fig 2 ScimagoJR Citations per Document

This edition has a total of 11 articles and one guest editorial. Seven articles are by authors with South African affiliations and the balance from international authors. The guest editorial, authored by Dr Dino Petrarolo and Cecil Everson, discusses the transformation of Distell’s supply chain. Dino is well known in the South African Industrial Engineering community, as past president of SAIIE, ECSA accreditation team leader, and prominent business leader and consultant.

Another interesting first in this edition is that one of the articles contains a summary in an African language – Siswati. SAJIE is registered as a bilingual journal, specifically for English and Afrikaans, hence the inclusion of an Afrikaans abstract on the cover page of each article. The inclusion of a Siswati abstract was seen as an opportunity to develop new, technical terminology for another one of South Africa’s official languages. Dr Sisana Mdluli from UNISA’s Department of African Languages has done the language editing on the summary. Many thanks Dr Mdluli!

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

Corne Schutte Editor