New Year Greeting from Editor-in-chief

Dear All,

I would like to take this opportunity during the holiday season to express my sincere thanks to our reviewers, authors, readers and section editors, associate editors, and staff members. At IJABE, we value your hard work and contributions to advancing agricultural and biological engineering research. I hope to receive your continuous support in the coming year, and I wish you a very happy new year and success in 2012.

I would also like to take this opportunity to summarize the progresses made so far: IJABE, started in 2008, is a joint publication by US-based Association of Agricultural, Biological and Food Engineers (AOCABFE) and China-based Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering (CSAE). So far, over 400 submissions were received from over 20 countries, and four volumes with 14 issues and over 140 papers were published. The website of IJABE attracts over 300 thousand of total visits from over 80 countries around the world. Many papers published in IJABE were cited by other prestigious journals. The total registered users in IJABE database reached over 6000 up to date.

Although IJABE is a newly-launched journal, it grows quickly. So far, online IJABE has been covered and indexed by CA, CAB Abstracts, CABI, Abstract Journals, Agricola, Agris, Scopus, EBSCOhost, Index Copernicus, Inspec, and google scholar, and has been listed on the world’s biggest online OA journals platform DOAJ and Open J-Gate, and also Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. Most importantly, according to the latest statistics from Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge, in the databases of Web of Knowledge, 112 papers published were found, and the sum of times cited reached 68, with the times of the most-cited papers reaching 16, which was published in IJABE in 2009. Average citation per item is 0.61, and h-index is 4. This is an encouraging achievement.

Please note that you can help to maintain and achieve greater success by publishing your high-quality research papers in IJABE, reviewing papers for IJABE if requested, and citing papers published in IJABE as much as possible in your own publications, and also by encouraging your colleagues, students and friends to do so.

You are invited to submit your next high quality manuscript (in particular review papers) to IJABE.

We are currently updating the editorial board. We are inviting qualified, earnest and responsible experts to serve on the editorial board. Your active participation and contribution will be greatly appreciated. We welcome your comments and suggestions.

Have a Happy Holiday and a Prosperous New Year!

Editor-in-chief

Roger Ruan

Professor and Director at the University of Minnesota