Dr. Jian Sun
Professor, Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering (ECSE)
Director, New York State Center for Future Energy Systems (CFES)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Contact Information
110 8th Street, CII 8015 – CFES |
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IEEE Power Electronics Letters
January 2010 marked the 7th anniversary of the publication of IEEE Power Electronics Letters, which was started in January 2003 to fill the need of the Power Electronics Society for a focused, rapid-publication archival journal. Prof. Philip Krein of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the founding Editor-in-Chief. The journal published four issues each year between 2003 and 2005. In January 2006, Power Electronics Letters (hereafter referred to as the Letters) became part of the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, but continues to have a separate editorial team to maintain its focus and to facilitate its rapid publication. Prof. Patrick Chapman of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign became its EIC in 2007, and I took over the responsibility in April 2008. On behalf of the Power Electronics Society, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all authors, reviewers, and associate editors for their contributions to the Letters. Our field has evolved over the years and so has the publication environment of the Letters. The purpose of this editorial is to review the scope and focus of the Letters, and to discuss its review process and selection criteria, with the objective to provide some useful guidelines for prospective authors in their preparation of manuscripts for the Letters, and help establish more uniform and coherent review criteria among our reviewers.The focus of the Letters is new ideas and fundamental concepts. A letter is still expected to include a literature review to establish its relationship to prior work, and present sufficient results to prove the validity and viability of the proposed concept, but these parts must be written concisely in order to focus on the new idea and specific contribution. Works dealing with subjects that cannot be presented in this format because of the need for extensive literature review, lengthy mathematical derivation and analysis, or extensive experimental verification and validation shall be submitted as regular papers to the Transactions. On the other hand, adding routine mathematical derivations, numerical simulation, or other unimportant or unnecessary details to an otherwise good letter submission to make it a regular paper would actually degrade its quality. A recent special issue published in the Transactions received quite a few such submissions where the low-quality, routine work wrapped around the core idea gave reviewers sufficient reasons to recommend a rejection. Some of those papers were later accepted as letters after the routine portions were removed. The Letters was created to publish focused new ideas and we should all take advantage of it.
The typical review cycle for a letter submission is 6-8 weeks. This short review cycle might appear to be less significant an advantage today as the backlog for regular papers has been gradually eliminated. Here, I would like to point out that the real advantage of the Letters as a media for rapid publication is in the short time from the inception of a new idea to its publication. With its focus as outlined above, the Letters makes it possible for authors to quickly publish original ideas with preliminary results rather than spending months or even years to develop details, build prototypes, and examine different practical aspects to support a regular paper. This should also be attractive to students who may have limited time to demonstrate original contributions through peer-reviewed journal publication.
One question that arises often in the review of letters is how important experimental results are. As an application-oriented community, we all value experimental work and tend to have more confidence when a concept has been proven in practical settings. But we must also recognize that many ideas generate new insights and research opportunities prior to comprehensive experimental demonstration and, conversely, experimental results alone do not always demonstrate the value and validity of an idea. For example, experienced workers would not accept claims for extreme efficiency improvements on small dc-dc converters based only on simulations and computations, but we would not insist on seeing experimental measurements if an author presents a closed-form spectral representation for sinusoidal PWM with arbitrary harmonic injection. In fact, in the latter case, we would not accept the results if they are shown to correlate with measurements but without offering mathematical analysis. Therefore, the answer to the question of experiments depends on the nature of the ideas presented. But in general, because of the Letters’ focus on ideas, the inclusion of experimental results simply for the sake of completeness is not a foregone requirement (and may even be counterproductive if they are not relevant for validating the main ideas presented.)
Letters are limited to four pages in length upon final publication in the Transactions. This page limit is consistent with the focus of the Letters and its mission of rapid publication. Because of the shorter length, a letter might be perceived as a “lighter” contribution compared to a regular paper. Such comparison by length is inappropriate, because letters serve a unique role in our profession by promoting timely exchange and sharing of ideas and new developments. To enhance the value of the Letters to our society, the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Power Electronics Society has endorsed a proposal to publish letters in the front of each issue of the Transactions in the future. To further facilitate rapid publication, a letter submission that requires only minor changes may be accepted without resubmission, while an otherwise acceptable submission may be rejected if it requires extensive revision that is deemed infeasible in a short period of time. The Letters uses the same online submission system as the Transactions on Power Electronics provided by Manuscript Central ( http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tpel-ieee ). Therefore, authors who have an account in Manuscript Central for the Transactions can use it for Letter submission. Select “Letter” (instead of “Regular Paper”) when you upload your submission files, and the manuscript will be reviewed as a Letter. Manuscript format and submission requirements other than length are the same as for regular papers submitted to the Transactions.
Please feel free to contact me should you have any questions or need additional information. I look forward to your contributions.
Jian Sun, PhD
Editor-in-Chief, Power Electronics Letters