Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy
Report to IAU Commission 7
2002-2005

 

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.

<>Another important fact in the period was the merging of Kluwer and Springer to form a new company. The merging affected the production routines and successive problems and errors were recorded in the period 2004--2005. These difficulties are almost over and the journal is being published at a pace not far from the nominal schedules. The efforts to increase the diffusion of the journal, initiated by Kluwer, were continued and CMDA reaches now, through electronic and hardcopy subscriptions, some 4,000 institutions. The old issues are now available for free download through the NASA-ADS site. The better diffusion is in direct correspondence with the increase in the impact factor, the growth of one of them directly influencing the growth of the other.

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.

S. Ferraz-Mello
Editor-in-chief