Editorial: First Impact Factor for Indian Geotechnical Journal.

Abstract

Indian Geotechnical Journal (IGTJ) [1] is happy to receive the first-ever impact factor of 1.4 in 2022 and got listed under Emerging Sources Citation Index (E-SCI) for the category Engineering, Geological as per Clarivate data [2] published on 29th June 2023. Starting in 1971, during the journey of last 53 years, this old prestigious journal in the domain of Geotechnical Engineering, which is published by Springer, in association with Indian Geotechnical Society (IGS), New Delhi, India, has received the much-awaited impact factor for the first time as 1.4. It has further scope of improvement, which is only possible with the support from all concerned like readers, authors, reviewers, editors and Springer officials of IGTJ. Though the Indian Geotechnical Journal under the flagship of Indian Geotechnical Society (IGS) [3], started publishing regular volumes since January 1971, its visibility significantly enhanced once it started getting published by Springer since January 2012. In this context, the efforts made by previous editors, mainly, Prof. G. L. Sivakumar Babu and Prof. G. Madhavi Latha, with the Associate Editors and Editorial Boards are highly commendable and details of those can be found in the editorials by Latha [4] and Choudhury [5]. Before taking over by Springer in 2012 (i.e., Volume 42 onward), Indian Geotechnical Journal had also published earlier several classical and important research findings since 1971. All these pre-Springer volumes (i.e., Volume 1 to Volume 41) of IGTJ are now available at http://igshq.in/igjbackvolumes/ [6], which are hosted at the website of Indian Geotechnical Society (IGS), New Delhi, India. Thanks to the entire team of IGS office, a few IGS Executive Committee members led by Associate Editor Prof. A. Murali Krishna, to increase archival value of the pre-Springer issues of IGTJ by adding soft copies in the website. Worldwide researchers and practitioners in the domain of Geotechnical Engineering are free to submit their first-hand best quality technical paper/note/state-of-the-art/case study to Indian Geotechnical Journal. Recently, the number of manuscript submissions has increased significantly for IGTJ. To further improve the technical quality of the publications, the editorial board members (EBMs) and several competent expert reviewers are working together, which has made the acceptance rate of about 20% for IGTJ in present time. As per Springer journal policy and the decision by EBM, for authors to publish their original research findings, it is expected that the system identified similarity index should be less than 30% in total, and most importantly, the similarity index should be less than 3% with any individual source. Exceptions to this for the state-of-the-art or review papers may be allowed by the handling editors. This is to encourage more original research works and to reduce chances of plagiarism for the published works in the peer-reviewed old society journal like IGTJ. Also, if the submitted manuscripts are not following the submission guidelines and format of IGTJ, which is available at: https://www.springer.com/journal/40098/submission-guidelines [7], the manuscript is returned back to the authors without reviewing/processing. For the information of potential authors and expert reviewers, it may be noted that the typical flow process to arrive at the decision on a submitted manuscript after above mentioned initial screening is listed in Table 1.