Proceedings of the IEEE

• 1. Introduction

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  The Proceedings of the IEEE has been tracking the arc of electrical engineering for well over a century, and the story of how it got its name is itself a small history of the field. It began not as the voice of a global engineering body, but as the journal of a much smaller organization devoted to a then-exotic technology: wireless transmission. That origin raises a question worth sitting with. How does a publication born in the wireless boom of the early twentieth century become one of the most cited journals in electrical engineering and computer science? The answer runs through mergers, institutional ambitions, and one editor who held his post for an almost unbelievable length of time.

• 2. Wireless Roots

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  Greenleaf Pickard and Alfred Goldsmith produced six issues of the Proceedings of the Wireless Institute starting in 1909, when the organization was still young and the field of wireless telegraphy was barely a generation old. That modest run ended when two regional organizations decided their futures lay together. The Wireless Institute of New York and the Society of Wireless Telegraph Engineers of Boston merged in 1911, producing the Institute of Radio Engineers, known as the IRE. The name change mattered: radio engineering was becoming a discipline in its own right, distinct from the general study of wireless phenomena, and the new institution wanted a name that reflected that ambition.

  In January 1913 the IRE published the first issue of the Proceedings of the IRE, and the journal took on the character it would keep for decades: a venue for serious technical work aimed at practitioners and researchers in radio and electronics. The IRE's fiftieth anniversary in May 1962 produced a landmark 1,000-page special issue, a statement of how much ground the field had covered in half a century.

• 3. Alfred Goldsmith's Long Tenure

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  Alfred Norton Goldsmith, one of the founding editors of the journal under its earliest banner, went on to serve as the first editor-in-chief for 42 years. That single figure is worth pausing over. Forty-two years of editorial oversight spans two world wars, the birth of television, the invention of the transistor, and the early years of digital computing. His tenure gave the publication an unusual continuity of editorial vision across an era of extraordinary technological change.

  Goldsmith's presence across the journal's early decades meant that a single figure witnessed and helped shape the editorial standards of the field during its most formative stretch. The journal he helped establish with six initial issues in 1909 had, by the time his editorship ended, become the primary record of a transformed engineering landscape.

• 4. The IEEE Merger and a New Name

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  1963 brought another institutional reorganization when the IRE merged with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the IEEE. The journal carried that new institutional identity forward, dropping "IRE" from its masthead and becoming the Proceedings of the IEEE. The merger united two traditions that had developed in parallel: radio and electronics engineering on one side, electrical engineering in the broader sense on the other.

  Published monthly by the IEEE, the journal became a peer-reviewed record spanning electrical engineering and computer science. Its scope grew alongside the field, eventually covering the full range of technical developments that the IEEE itself came to represent. The Science Citation Index, the Science Citation Index Expanded, Current Contents, and Chemical Abstracts Service all index the journal, placing it within the standard networks scholars use to locate and cite technical literature.

• 5. Format and Editorial Structure

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  The Proceedings publishes roughly ten Special Issues and two regular paper issues each year. The distinction between those two formats is deliberate. Special Issues are assembled by guest editor teams drawn from leading specialists and function as state-of-the-art guides for both core researchers and experts working in adjacent areas. Regular Paper Issues are narrower in scope, typically carrying three to four papers on a focused topic and offering readers background on emerging areas.

  Within those formats the journal distinguishes among three types of coverage. Reviews trace a technology from its origins to the present. Surveys look broadly at a technology's applications, issues, and implications. Tutorials explain how a technology works and may include practical guidance for those implementing it. Together these modes let the journal serve readers who want historical perspective, those who want a comprehensive map of a field, and those who want to build something.

• 6. Standing in the Field

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  According to the Journal Citation Reports, the Proceedings of the IEEE carried an impact factor of 9.107 in 2017, placing it sixth in the category of electrical and electronic engineering journals. By 2018 that figure had risen to 10.694, moving the journal to fifth in the same category. Impact factor measures how often a journal's articles are cited by other researchers; a figure above nine places the Proceedings among the most-referenced venues in its discipline.

  For a journal that began with six issues under a small wireless organization and spent its first five decades tethered to the narrower world of radio engineering, that standing reflects how completely the field it covers has expanded. The 1,000-page anniversary issue of 1962 was a milestone inside the IRE's own history; the citation metrics of the twenty-first century situate the journal within the global infrastructure of scientific publishing.