Systematic & Applied Acarology (SAA) started as an annual print publication in 1996 and this continued for a decade (Zhang 2005). The increase of frequency to biannual in 2006 and then to triannual from 2007 allowed more papers published in a timely manner (Zhang 2008). During 2007 and 2011, SAA was published three times per year and the number of papers per year averaged 35, or 26% more than that of the first 11 years (Fig. 1). In 2011, SAA was selected for coverage in Science Citation Index Expanded (Zhang 2011). This made SAA more attractive as an outlet to a broader range of authors and the number of papers/pages per year started to increase rapidly (Fig. 1). SAA was published quarterly during 2012–2014 and the number of papers averaged 50 per year during this period.
FIGURE 1.
Numbers of papers and pages per year in Systematic & Applied Acarology. Data of 1996–2007 from summary in Zhang (2008).
Zhang (2014b) predicted the first impact factor for SAA (2013) to be more than 1.1, which is very close to 1.115 published in Journal of Citation Reports (JCR Science edition, July 2014). JCR ranks SAA 37th of 90 journals in entomology; this JCR ranking of SAA is similar to Zhang (2014a)'s ranking of SAA as the 3rd of 9 research journals in acarology. As a result of the relatively good ranking of SAA, submissions by authors rapidly increased during the last six months and we expect more than 100 papers to be accepted in 2015. This sudden increase in submission will increase the cost of production per year significantly without similar increase in subscription rates. Therefore, we will need to control the rate of increase of published papers to an acceptable level. SAA editors will be more selective in manuscript evaluation, (1) encouraging more high quality non-taxonomic papers to address the balance between taxonomic and non-taxonomic papers, and (2) discouraging single species description while giving priority to high quality systematic papers on comparative treatments and revisions of multiple taxa. In addition to review papers and research articles (over 4 printed pages), we welcome short correspondence (up to 4 printed pages) for condensed version of small papers, comments on other papers, and short reviews or opinion pieces. The correspondence format will save space by omitting the abstract, key words, and major headings such as Introduction.
During 1996 to 2014, the print edition of SAA was the version of record, and the electronic version (in pdf) was released at the same time of the print edition or slightly after. Now with a new ISSN for the online edition of SAA, we will register all taxonomic papers prior to publication in ZooBank and archive SAA following requirements of International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN 2012) for e-publication. From 2015, the online edition of SAA will be the version of record meeting the requirements of ICZN (2012) and will be published before the print edition. The print edition will continue to be quarterly in 2015. The two editions will be identical in content.
I thank all the editors, reviewers and authors for their contributions to SAA.
