Automatica, June, 1996, Volume 32, No. 6
Prompted by IFAC President Steve Kahne and on the initiative of Publishing Editor Michael Dawes of Elsevier by the end of 1995 the project of compiling a cumulative table of contents of Automatica was undertaken. Michel ten Bulte, student in my department and temporary editorial assistant for Automatica, spent 140 hours to input the information into a database.
The complete table of contents for Volumes 1 to 31 appears in the form of a supplement to Automatica. The supplement also contains author and subject indices. The cumulative table of contents will moreover be made accessible on Internet. An announcement will follow soon.
It is interesting to look at some bibliometric information.
The first issue of Automatica is dated January-March, 1963. It contains five papers. The names of almost all the authors are well-known until today. They include J. H. Westcott, R. Starkermann, H. H. Rosenbrock, S. S. L. Chang and M. Aoki. The first issue also has a report of an IFAC Symposium, although Automatica did not become an IFAC journal until the first issue of Volume 5 in January, 1969, with George Axelby as Editor.
It is fascinating to look over the tables of contents of the early volumes. In the 60s the control field could still easily be surveyed, and nine out of 10 authors have familiar names. Volume 1 (1963) has about 320 pages, and there are 20 authors. The size of Volume 31 (1995) is 1900 pages, with about 400 authors.
During the 31 years from 1963 to 1995 as many as 3026 items were published, including editorials, meeting reports and similar publications. Multiple contributions not removed, 5520 authors participated, comprising about 2800 individuals. Of these 2800 individual authors 1836 authored or co-authored only a single paper.
Table 1 lists the top ten (co)authors. All but two of G. S. Axelby's publications and several of those of H. Kwakernaak are editorials. When first compiled the top ten list contained the names Chen and Lee. They turned out to be many authors.
Soon after Automatica became an IFAC journal the authors were asked to list keywords for their papers. These keywords were used to compile the subject index. For papers from the earlier volumes keywords were added. Editorials and like publications are not included in the subject index. The subject index lists almost 3000 keywords with 12400 references.
Table 2 shows the keywords which are referenced more than 100 times.
Huibert Kwakernaak, Editor-in-Chief
Table 1. Top ten authors 1963-1995 Author Number of papers G. S. Axelby 45 B. D. O. Anderson 32 E. J. Davison 32 K. J. Åström 25 T. Söderström 22 R. Isermann 21 L. Ljung 20 G. C. Goodwin 19 P. V. Kokotovic 19 H. Kwakernaak 16
Table 2 Keywords with more than 100 references Keyword Number of references Adaptive control 305 Optimal control 277 Identification 255 Parameter estimation 244 Stability 217 Linear systems 184 Non-linear systems 168 Robust control 158 Discrete-time systems 143 Multivariable systems 140 Robustness 140 Multivariable control systems 110 Optimization 110 Computer control 104 Large-scale systems 103 Kalman filter 102 Modeling 101