Some statistics on manuscripts submitted during the last 5 years (2001-2005)

(status as of 1 Feb 2006)

year	nr. of submissions	page budget	impact factor	rejection ratio (%)
2001	73	348	NA	29
2002	74	368	1.118	49
2003	180	496	1.274	47
2004	166	496	1.575	46
2005	232	608	NA	28*
2006	NA	840	NA	NA

* inaccurate estimate (relatively few final decisions made yet)

Manuscript review outomes

row nr.	number of papers	2005	2004	2003	2002	2001
1	submitted	232	166	180	74	73
2	returned by EiC for scope reasons, obvious poor quality, etc	6	7	5	3	0
3	peer reviewed (row 1 less row 2)	226	159	175	71	73
3a	papers from row 3 eventually rejected	64	73	83	35	21
3b	papers from 3 in review process	89	4	2	0	0
3c	papers from row 3 with authors for revision	31	12	0	0	1
3d	other papers from row 3 (authors do not submit revision)	4	5	16	4	6
3e	papers from row 3 queued for publication	34	20	1	1	0
3f	papers from row 3 eventually published (printed version)	4	45	73	31	45
4	percentage rejected (row 3a divided by row 3)	28	46	47	49	29
5	average nr of months from submission to first decision	3.5	4.4	4.6	6.8	6.9
6	average nr of months from submission to final acceptance	6.4	9.9	9.3	11.2	10.9
7	average nr of months from submission to publication date	11.4	15.1	15.1	15.6	18.3

The figures with box-and-whisker plots below show more detailed statistics on rows 5 to 7. In addition to the decreasing medians in each category the widths of the distributions have also decreased.

Months from submission to first decision (reject, revision, or accept)
Months from submission to final decision acceptance (time typically includes several (1 to 3) revision and review cycles)
Months from submission to publication (printed - possible earlier appearance on IEEE Xplore not taken into account)

Geographical distribution of authors of published papers

percentages based on the year of publication (not year of submission), all authors of papers taken into account.

region of author affiliation	2005	2004	2003	2002	2001
Regions 1 – 6 (U.S.A.)	26.3	26.1	33.7	44.0	25.6
Region 7 (Canada)	4.5	1.4	1.7	6.0	2.3
Region 8 (Europe, Africa and Middle-East)	54.7	40.6	39.9	34.7	46.5
Region 9 (Central- and South-America)	0.0	2.9	1.1	0.0	3.1
Region 10 (Asia and Pacific)	14.4	29.0	23.6	15.3	22.5

Citation reports

year	total cites	impact factor	immediacy index	articles	cited half-life
2002	176	1.118	0.171	35	2.9
2003	243	1.274	0.160	25	3.5
2004	389	1.575	0.292	48	3.8

impact factor: The number of current citations to articles published in a specific journal in a two year period divided by the total number of articles published in the same journal in the corresponding two year period.
immediacy index: The average number of times that an article published in a specific year within a specific journal is cited over the course of that same year.
cited half-life: The number of journal publication years, going back from the current year, that account for 50% of the total citations given by the citing journal in the current year.

Special Issues printed

Special Issue (SI) or Special Section (SS)	Status
Bioinformatics	SS in June 2002 issue
Virtual Reality Therapy Systems	SS in September 2002 issue
Pervasive healthcare	SS in September 2004 issue
Selected papers	SI in IEEE T-BME December 2002
mHealth	SSs in December 2004 and March 2005 issues
Knowledge management	SS in June 2005 issue
Wearable Health Management Systems & Intelligent Biomedical Clothing	SS in September 2005 issue