The editing of papers submitted in 2008 for publication in Powder Diffraction was completed at the end of June 2009, and the final six accepted 2008 papers will appear in this September 2009 issue. I report some interesting facts about the 2008 papers—I hope that this information may be of interest and useful to our readers.
The number of 2008 papers submitted for publication in Powder Diffraction is summarized in Table I.
TABLE I. Papers submitted to Powder Diffraction in 2008.
The total number of submitted technical papers, not including editorials and international reports, reached 83 in 2008, and this is the largest number of technical papers submitted to the journal in a single calendar year. Seventy-four out of the 83 submitted papers were accepted for publication, an 89% acceptance rate. A total of nine papers or 11% of the 8l submitted papers were not accepted (i.e., rejected or withdrawn) for publication. The authors of these papers should not be discouraged—they should keep this journal in mind for future submissions. Journal editors, staff, and I are happy to work with our authors to do whatever it takes to make all submissions worthy of publication.
The 2008 papers came from a total of 22 countries around the world. The geographical distribution of the papers is summarized in Figure 1 below.
The largest 2008 contributions were from Europe, and the total number of European papers was 36, 43% of the 2008 papers. These 36 papers were from nine European
Figure 1. (Color online) Worldwide distribution of the 2008 papers submitted to Powder Diffraction.
countries: 15 from Germany, 4 from Czech Republic, 3 each from Austria, Poland, Russia, and United Kingdom, 2 each from France and Italy, and 1 from Romania. The second largest contributions (24% of total) were from Asia: 10 from China, 4 from Japan, 3 from Iran, and 1 each from India and Pakistan. 18% of the papers were from North America: United States with 11 and Canada with 4. Latin America also made significant contributions to Powder Diffraction (12%). It is also worth noting that two of the 2008 papers were submitted from African countries, namely, Morocco and Tunisia (one each).
The 74 accepted papers for publication in Powder Diffraction came from three different sources:
1. Forty-four papers were submitted directly to Powder Diffraction and were published in the categories of technical articles (31), new diffraction data (12), and laboratory note (1). The most popular topic in the category of technical articles is on crystal structure determination/refinement with a total of 11 papers.
2. Fourteen papers were selected from the 2008 Denver X-ray Conference by editors of Advances in X-ray Analysis. These papers were on the subjects of XRD analysis (9) and XRF analysis (5). These papers were recently published in the special June 2009 issue.
3. Sixteen papers were chosen from the Eighth International Conference on Residual Stresses by the conference organizers: 6 of which were papers on methods for residual stresses analysis and 10 on applications of residual stresses analysis. These papers were published in the 2009 supplemental issue.
Powder Diffraction added a new category devoted to educational materials on powder diffraction crystallography in March 2006. Even though no 2008 papers were published in the category of crystallography education, there are two 2009 education papers that will be published in this September 2009 issue. These two papers may not be typical technical articles, but they are educational papers covering topics not usually found in other publications.
Earlier this year, Powder Diffraction started using a new online web-based manuscript submission and peer review system hosted by the American Institute of Physics’ Peer X-Press (PXP) service. PXP is a quick and easy tool for our authors to submit manuscripts to Powder Diffraction and allows our authors to easily track the status of their papers.
