TOMCCAP at the End of The Early Years

From the first ACM Multimedia conference in 1993 and continuing through the launch of ACM TOMCCAP in 2005 our community has been steadily growing and evolving. In the next 2 years there will be two new conferences supported by the SIGMM, namely the Multimedia Systems (MMSys) Conference and the International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), which are slated to be the most prominent meetings in their respective fields.

Our success can be measured in many ways, but one of them is statistics. A well known measure for scientific impact is the ISI Thomson Reuters journal impact factor. When TOMCCAP started in 2005, I for one had expected the impact factor to slowly increase as the rest of the scientific world came to realize the high quality of our publications.

A snapshot of the ISI multimedia journal impact factors (August 2009)

I know that the impact factor is only a statistic and that with all of these benchmarks, one must keep some salt handy. However, this is a statistic which is notable to us. Our TOMCCAP journal is the highest impact multimedia journal worldwide. The ranking by impact factor (August 2009) of all of the ISI multimedia journals is given below and I believe is worthy of recording in the SIGMM Records.

1. ACM Trans. on Multimedia Computing, Communication and Applications (2.465)
2. IEEE Trans. on Multimedia (2.288)
3. IEEE Multimedia Magazine (2.258)
4. Multimedia Systems Journal (0.679)
5. Multimedia Tools and Applications (0.462)

I had expected TOMCCAP to be number one in perhaps 10 to 15 years, but to achieve so much success so early shows exceptional leadership on the part of the editor-in-chief, Prof. Nicolas D. Georganas.

A snapshot of the ISI paper citation rankings (August 2009)

Furthermore, a journal can only be as good as the contributors. The top 5 most cited papers published in the early years of TOMCCAP (as measured by ISI Thomson Reuters) are

1. Michael S. Lew, Nicu Sebe, Chabane Djeraba, Ramesh Jain: Content-based multimedia information retrieval: State of the art and challenges
2. Lawrence A. Rowe, Ramesh Jain: ACM SIGMM retreat report on future directions in multimedia research
3. Ba Tu Truong, Svetha Venkatesh: Video abstraction: A systematic review and classification
4. Dick C. A. Bulterman, Lynda Hardman: Structured multimedia authoring
5. Cees Snoek, Marcel Worring, Alex Hauptmann: Learning rich semantics from news video archives by style analysis

As I write this, Prof. Georganas is preparing to step down from his post as Editor-in-Chief, and I hope that a worthy successor can be found. He has set a high bar which may be very difficult to repeat. It will be even more difficult unless our community redirects our journal submissions from other publications to TOMCCAP. Previously, I had not submitted papers to TOMCCAP because my university encourages publications in ISI high impact journals. Now that we have the highest impact multimedia journal, I think we should submit our best work to TOMCCAP, not other publications.

They may only be statistics, but this year they are ours.