Message from the Editor - What's Next

Now that the online-only Engineering Design Graphics Journal is a reality, what’s next? First, an ad-hoc Engineering Design Graphics Journal Advisory Board has been formed to provide the Journal with input from academic, business, government, and industry experts. Past editors of the Journal, who are still active with the Engineering Design Graphics Division, comprise the charter Board—Judy Birchman, Jon Duff, La Verne Abe Harris, Mary Sadowski, and Eric Wiebe. Jon Duff is serving as its chair. The Advisory Board functions in an advisory capacity and organizes and administers itself as it sees fit to fulfill its mission. Advice provided can range from the very esoteric to the very technical. The Board’s suggested mission is to provide (1) the Journal with direction from those who deal with the subject matter published and (2) a voice for academia, business, government, and industry to ensure the direction of the Journal is in the best interests of the Journal and its readers. Key is ensuring we maintain a certain level of quality and make relevant incremental improvements. It is my belief that such an Advisory Board will help produce a better editorial product, which will benefit those it is intended to serve. Second, our Associate Editor, Nancy Study, recently received an inquiry from an author on whether in effect the Journal is indexed by Thomson Reuter’s Journal Citation Reports. It seems the author’s concern was whether standard performance measures were available for the Journal. The matter of the Journal’s performance has been the topic of numerous conversations. Nancy has suggested we consider having the Journal indexed by the likes of Thomson Reuter’s Journal Citation Reports in order to take advantage of the information available and to improve the visibility of the Journal. This will probably be a topic for the Engineering Design Graphics Division’s Executive Committee to consider in June. If this is a matter of concern and is a priority to you, let us know. Third, Cody Skidmore, an East Carolina University graduate assistant and the Journal’s Web Production Manager, graduated this past December. He’s now a staff member with The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Cody was instrumental in launching the online-only Engineering Design Graphics Journal. He is already sorely missed. However, he has agreed to continue assisting with the production of the Journal by assembling the various components that make up the Journal. Finally, and we need your help with this; consider publishing the results of your research and other creative activities with us. The process is fairly straight forward. Prepare your manuscript electronically in accordance with the current edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (the Manual)—see also http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/. Then submit your manuscript, along with an abstract, figures, tables, and the like, as an attachment to Nancy Study, the Journal’s Associate Editor at nstudy@vsu.edu. To ensure our articles are clear and consistent from article to article, issue to issue, and volume to volume, authors are asked to comply with the guidance provided by the Manual. The guidance addresses matters of the consistent use of punctuation and abbreviations, construction of tables, selection of headings, citation of references, table and figure titles, and quotations to name a few. In addition, the following must be considered when preparing a manuscript for publication in the Engineering Design Graphics Journal: typeface and size, line-spacing, margins, order of manuscript pages, page number and page headers, corrections, paragraphs and indentations, use of uppercase and lowercase letters, headings, spacing and punctuation, seriation, quotations, and statistical and mathematical symbology. Guidance for preparation of the following is also provided by the Manual: title page; abstract; text; references; appendices; footnotes and notes; tables and table titles, notes, and rules; figures and figure captions; spell checking; and the cover letter. Help the Journal’s staff to improve the production of our flagship publication—the Engineering Design Graphics Journal.