It is our greatest pleasure to announce that Virtual and Physical Prototyping has been indexed in the Web of Science from this year onwards, under Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). For information on ESCI, please refer to the website: http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/multidisciplinary/esci/. Being included in ESCI is the first step and our next goal is to receive an impact factor.
On the 16th May 2016, VPP had its first editorial board meeting at the Singapore Centre for 3D Printing of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The combined physical and online attendance by the editorial board members is more than 70%. The most exciting news released by our publisher – Taylor & Francis – is that the ‘Mock Impact Factor’ of VPP is trending up (see ) to exactly 1.0, and hopefully it will cross 2.0 for this year. However, maintaining the competiveness and staying where we are now will never be an easy task. We should be more cautious and more stringent on the novelty and the quality of submitted manuscripts, making sure that VPP continues to publish impactful results and be a magnet that attracts quality submissions.
Figure 1. Mock impact factor of VPP (data source: Taylor & Francis).
While maintaining the quality, we have also gradually increased the number of papers per issue since the last December (see ). The additional papers cover a wide range of new topics in 3D printing, such as 4D printing, concrete printing and new applications of 3D printing (e.g. heat transfer, animal science).
Table 1. Number of articles per issue.
One challenge we are facing is the visibility of VPP. Despite being the second oldest journal in the field of 3D printing, the visibility of VPP to general researchers seems to be quite low compared to its peer journals. This is evidenced by searching the keyword ‘3D printing journal’ in Google, the first 10 pages (top 100 results) do not include VPP. To address this challenge, we have changed the keywords for VPP online such that it becomes more ‘searchable’ by various topics. Nevertheless, we strongly encourage our readers to provide novel suggestions to further improve its visibility to general researchers.