SUMMARY
The journal experienced again a very successful year. We introduced the special edition last year, and we continued with this newly established tradition this year, selecting the best contributions from related conferences and publishing it in a special edition. This has a positive impact on the quality of the submissions to those conferences, because conference authors were now competing on quality for the honour of being selected for the special edition, and it also exposes young researchers to journal quality submissions. When a journal extends the number of editions, it has an impact on the journal’s impact factor. Scopus (www.scopus.com) measures impact with a “CiteScore” and the graph shows the tremendous progress made over the last few years. The CiteScore for a year is calculated as Citation Count for the year / number of documents the previous 3 years. Since we now publish more articles per year with a local content, one can thus expect the CiteScore to flatten and even reduce – we had seen a similar trend in 2012 – 2014 when we moved from 2 to 3 editions per year in 2012. We plan to continue with the special edition in 2018. It does make the end of the year very challenging, because it means that we in effect publish two editions in November (the special edition in the first half of November, after all the participating conferences were completed, and this final edition that we can then only finalise in December). This edition has a total of 14 articles, with 11 from authors with South African connections and the balance from international authors. One of the articles was earmarked for the special edition, but due to an administrative error in the selection process, it was then re-allocated to this edition. If you have suggestions on how we can take this journal forward, please let me know. C.S.L. Schutte: Editor