In the past two years, submission of papers to the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing has been increasing rapidly. Many of the anonymous reviewers who review manuscripts for the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing have reasonable average review times and provide professional comments. Based on the review statistics, I would like to provide some annual recognition for reviewers who go well beyond the call of duty. Therefore, I am using this first editorial of 2016 to recognize some of the top reviewers for the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing over the past year.
There were roughly 600 reviewers who actively reviewed manuscripts for the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing in 2015. Identifying the top reviewers amongst this group is by no means an easy task. I used three criteria to separate out the top candidates: percentage of reviews completed on time, total reviews completed, and quality of reviews. The first two criteria were directly assessed by quantitative analysis. The top 20 candidates generally reviewed 5 to 15 Journal of Applied Remote Sensing manuscripts over the course of the past year, accepted over half of review requests, and completed their reviews within three weeks of the request. Assessing the quality of review comments is obviously much more qualitative. For this, I relied on my own assessments of the review comments directly.
Based on this assessment, I would like to recognize the following individuals as the top ten reviewers for the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing in 2015:
• Alireza Taravat, Department of Civil Engineering and Computer Science, Tor Vergata University, Rome, Italy
• Jia Xu, Department of Physics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
• Lifu Zhang, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth (RADI), Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China
• Chen Chen, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, Texas, USA
• Yi Yang, Amazon Inc., Sunnyvale, California, USA
• Hongjun Su, School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, China
• Ben Ma, Topaz Labs LLC, Dallas, Texas, USA
• Salim Lamine, School of Ecology and Environment, University of Sciences and Technology Houari Boumediene, Bab Ezzouar, Algeria
• Yonghua Wu, NOAA-CREST, City College of New York, New York, USA
• Dilek Koc-San, Space Sciences and Technologies, Akdeniz University, Antalya, Turkey
Their great contributions to this journal are highly appreciated, and I hope that our community will join me in thanking them for their service. Moreover, I would like to extend this same appreciation to the numerous other excellent reviewers for the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing who were not included in the top-ten list during our assessment this year. I believe that all of the reviewers listed above do highly deserve such recognition.
