The turning of a year is a cue for many of us to reflect on the year just ending and anticipate the one ahead. I will not resist that temptation here, in the last of our editorials for 2022. The impact factor of Maritime Engineering has raised to 5.95 and has been promoted to Q1 in the category of ‘Engineering, Ocean’ according to the Journal Citation Report for 2021, indeed ranking in first position of the 16 journals in this category. The Q1 classification was also achieved in the categories of ‘Civil Engineering’ and ‘Water Resources’, where Maritime Engineering ranked in positions 16 out of 138 and 14 out of 100, respectively. With an ever-increasing flow of high-quality submissions being anticipated, we hope that the transfer of our peer review to ReView (River Valley Technologies’ peer review and production tracking system) will, once we have all become fully familiar with it, enable us to continually improve on process efficiency and author experience.
We can also reflect on the extent to which our output aligns with a range of our aspirations including maintaining a balance between papers arising from academic and industry sectors, encouraging geographical and gender diversity in our contributor base. Actually, 2022's scorecard is not so encouraging here – we have been rather academic-dominated, with only one paper led by a private sector author, we have contributing authors based in only five countries and our author gender balance continues to follow rather than lead in our sector. Although a single year's snapshot (here, eight publications) does not give a stable measure of any of these indicators, it is a timely reminder that there is work to be done on all these counts. I am delighted that we have three new panel members, identified, persuaded and appointed with these priorities in mind; two are widely experienced private sector professionals (one UK-based, one USA-based) and the third brings 20 years of experience in projects in the UK's government/agency sector.
Looking ahead, our journal's success presents us with a virtuous circle of being in receipt of more strong manuscripts as more authors see the Maritime Engineering journal as a high-impact outlet for their contributions. From next year, we will be expanding the size of each issue, from 30 pages to approximately 48, so a 50% increase in our capacity. My co-chairs and I are keen to use this extra space not only to ‘do more of the same’ (i.e. publishing excellent, traditional research papers) but also to encourage a wider variety of contributed content such as short ‘Briefing’ papers which summarise recent work of interest in cases where there could be immediate and wide interest but there is not (yet) the depth and/or extent of novelty that would be anticipated for a conventional paper.
We will also continue to refresh the panel, partly to replace the colleagues whose term of service has ended, but also to expand the panel to reflect the 50% increase in throughput that we will now maintain. In identifying new panel members, we will continue to move toward the improved balance referred to above, while at the same time seeking to draw in expertise in areas of study that we see emerging quickly, including nature-based solutions, climate-change impact modelling, advances in machine-learning-based approaches, advances in rising sectors such as offshore structures and technology and offshore aquaculture and associated engineering applications.
Next year, we expect to devote two of the four issues to being themed issues, one on ‘Offshore structures and subsea technology’ and a second on ‘Sustainability in maritime engineering’, with these being piloted by our guest editors Dimitrios Pavlou (University of Stavanger) and Maria di Leo (HR Wallingford), respectively.
Coming back to the present and this issue 4 of volume 175, we are delighted to offer two contributions which explore the application of the latest computational methods in different parts of our sector.
Yin et al. (2022) use genetic-algorithm-based approaches to explore an issue of very high economic importance to container port owners and operators – the optimisation of the parallel, complex, multi-stage quayside operations that must happen to load each of perhaps 10 000 containers. Early results are very promising and if the anticipated scale-up can be achieved, it is easy to see that the economic impact could be very great.
Within the ever-challenging area of morphodynamics, Bordbar et al. (2022) offer us practical guidance on the application of two popular modelling approaches, the artificial transport rate method (ATRM) and the geometry-based method (GBM). Both are implemented in the widely used and open-source computational fluid dynamics software package OpenFOAM. Exploration by way of five distinctive test cases gives the reader insight into the balances between computational time and accuracy that can underpin the best decision making in this problem space.
Away from the confines of Maritime Engineering, 2022 has been a challenging year, with the terrible war in Ukraine straining the world's peace, and the knock-on impacts on our economy straining many households’ financial security and their overall well-being. The spectre of climate change impacts on all aspects of our life becomes ever greater with the passage of another year without any immediate prospect of the deep emissions cuts that will be required to avoid ‘the worst’ and keep global temperature rise to below 1.5°C. We must hope that 2023 brings a good peace in Ukraine, a reduction in economic stresses and the foresightful global leadership required to start turning the tide on carbon dioxide. For our part, our sector will continue to innovate, often in response to these challenges, and we the journal will continue to encourage the promulgation of these innovations after the due scrutiny of expert peers.
I hope that you are lucky enough to be looking forward to at least a little downtime over the Christmas period. On behalf of my co-chairs too, I wish you some well-earned rest ahead of what we hope will be a healthy, happy, very successful and, most importantly of all, peaceful 2023.
