The main fact to report concerns the journal impact factor, as published in the Journal of Citation Reports, which has continuously increased (plot) during the past 4 years and reached 0.856 in 2005. This factor measures the citations, in a given year, of papers published by the journal in the two previous calendar years. In fact, the citations to CMDA papers peak only in the third year after the publication year, and this profile is not taken into account by the rule adopted by the Institute for Scientific Information. If we proceed exactly as they do, but consider the papers published by the journal in the three or four previous years, instead of just two, we obtain an impact factor ~ 1.0, which more properly measures the impact of the journal. Since 2004 the journal is also included by JCR in the category Mathematics: Interdisciplinary Applications (in addition to Astronomy and Astrophysics) and ranked there in the 36th position on a set of 76 journals.
At last, we mention that the online manuscript submission, review and tracking system is now fully operational allowing much shorter times (plot) between the submission of one paper and the final decision concerning it. In the great majority of the cases the decision is taken within some months. These times could be yet shorter if all Associate Editors were collaborating to avoid unreasonable delays to appoint reviewers and decide on received reports. Some extremely long times are still recorded, but they generally correspond to papers demanding time consuming thorough revisions.
Editor-in-chief