TKDE 20(12) (December 2008) EIC Editorial: State of the Transactions

With this last issue of 2008, the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) has completed its 20 years of publication, and the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) has completed the second term of his TKDE EiC position. It has been four years since he assumed this position in January 2005. Thanks to the hard work and outstanding efforts of our Associate Editors, reviewers, authors, and support staff from the IEEE Computer Society Publications Office, TKDE has further strengthened its "premier" status over the past four years in the field of knowledge and data engineering, including data mining, database systems, and knowledge engineering. Our paper submission rate has continued to increase, and is now far higher than any other journal in data mining, database systems, and knowledge engineering. The journal impact factor exceeded 2.0 in 2006 for the first time, and ranks #3 in all IEEE Computer Society transactions in the most recent 2007 journal impact factors. The EiC would like to take this opportunity to review some of the major activities that have taken place over the past four years, some of which are based on the changes reported in his previous editorials.