Impact of Signal Processing and of Our Work

[ from the EDITOR ] s many of you have heard, Thomson Reuters has recently released its Jour nal Citation Reports (JCR), where IEEE Signal Processing Magazine has ranked first among all IEEE publications (125 in total) and among all publications within the electrical and electronics engineering category worldwide (245 in total). JCR provides " a systematic, objective means to critically evaluate the world's leading journals, with quantifiable, statistical information based on citation data. By compiling articles' cited references, JCR helps to measure research influence and impact at the journal and category levels " [1]. This is a great honor for our magazine , and it reflects the impact of signal processing as a field and of our work as a community. The credit and appreciation go to our authors, reviewers, editorial team, staff members, and especially the readers—who value and make use of our magazine's articles in their research, education, and engineering practice. The societal impact of signal processing and its extraordinary variety of applications constitute the underlying basis for our magazine's top impact factor. " Signal processing inside " is our slogan, highlighting the fundamental importance of signal processing to many engineering disciplines and its pervasiveness " inside " all sorts of electronic devices and technologies. To turn the " inside " out, our magazine created the " Special Reports " column that publishes application-oriented articles to appeal to the general public. The application areas covered so far include global positioning systems, consumer electronics, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, and smart grid (e.g., [2] and [3]). As a powerful evidence of the ubiquity of signal processing , the magazine is devoting several