The Journal of Transport and Land Use enters year six

Recently published:

  • Levinson, David (2013) The Journal of Transport and Land Use enters year six, Journal of Transport and Land Use 6(1), pp 1-5.
    The Journal of Transport and Land Use enters its sixth volume continuing to publish selected peer-reviewed papers from the most recent World Symposium on Transport and Land Use Research. The 2014 Symposium will be held in Delft, Netherlands, and we hope to see a large turnout. Look out for invitations and announcements.

Key items in this article include

  1. Metrics
  2. In the past year, the JTLU website has had almost 17,000 visits. According to Google Scholar, we have an h-index of 16, 16 articles cited 16 or more times, and a citation rate of 14.2 citations per article (this is up from 8.3 last year, and 3.6 the year before). This is not the equivalent of the (in)famous ISI 2-year impact factor, which has not been computed yet, and awaits inclusion in their database, but may be analogous to a 5-year impact factor. The articles that are published survive a rigorous review process. The Journal’s acceptance rate is just above 30 percent. We are also pleased that we are now indexed by Scopus, an important international abstract and citation database that catalogs qualified peer reviewed journals.

  3. Review Policies: Accept/Not Accept
  4. Going forward, JTLU is adopting clearer review criteria.
    All articles (including manuscripts, letters, literature reviews, and methods) will be accepted or not on the first round. We are eliminating “revise and resubmit” and “resubmit for re-
    view” as categories.

  5. Review Policies: Significance
  6. We are eliminating “significance” as a review criterion. Articles should be original, scientifically correct and technically sound, transparent, reproducible and adhere to data sharing standards, and clearly written to be understood. They must also be on the topic of Transport and Land Use (the “and” in our title is a Boolean “and,” denoting intersection, not an “or,” indicating union, we often get submissions which we desk- reject on either Transport or Land Use, but not considering the interaction).

  7. Paper length heterogeneity
  8. The “minimum publishable unit” is often derided in the academic literature as a paper in which the authors spread results in too many places, pursuing number of publications over quality of paper.
    On the other hand, sometimes papers are too long, reciting things that are well known.

  9. Editorial Advisory Board
  10. After five full years, we are making some significant changes to the Editorial Advisory Board (EAB).