Complex and Intelligent Systems

Overview

Complex & Intelligent Systems is a peer-reviewed, fully open access journal published by Springer Nature (Springer International Publishing AG) that sits at the intersection of three research domains: complex systems, computational simulation, and intelligent analytics and visualization. Launched in 2015, the journal has become one of the more prominent open-access outlets for work on machine learning, computational intelligence, data science, pattern recognition, and the modeling of complex adaptive systems. As of the 2025 Journal Citation Reports cycle, it holds a journal impact factor of roughly 6.9 for 2024, an SJR score of 1.143 with Q1 placement, and a Scopus CiteScore of 9.6 — metrics that put it among the higher-cited generalist journals in artificial intelligence and computational mathematics. This depth profile was compiled by Journals World from the journal's official Springer page, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and third-party bibliometric databases, accessed 10 October 2026.

The journal's identity is transdisciplinary by design: rather than belonging to a single sub-discipline such as pure machine learning or control theory, it solicits work whose value lies in connecting the study of complex systems (evolution, self-organization, emergent behavior) with computational simulation and intelligent data analytics. The practical consequence is a broad but coherent scope: optimization algorithms inspired by nature, fuzzy systems, deep learning, computer vision, big data analytics, agent-based modeling, decision support systems, and brain-like computing all appear side by side in its pages. Articles are published open access under Creative Commons licenses, and the journal operates a double-blind peer review process for all submissions.

Journal History

Complex & Intelligent Systems began publishing in 2015 as an open access journal under the SpringerOpen brand, supported by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which initially sponsored the open access fees so that authors could publish without charges. The journal was conceived to provide a dedicated forum for the cross-fertilization of complex systems research with computational intelligence and data analytics — fields that were expanding rapidly in the early 2010s alongside deep learning's breakthrough results, the rise of big data infrastructure, and growing interest in emergent, self-organizing phenomena across physics, biology, and the social sciences.

The journal's early years were marked by a distinctive structural choice: a regular section of invited survey and position papers examining the foundations of complex and intelligent systems research, which helped to establish its intellectual identity while it built a submitted-paper pipeline. Coverage in Thomson Reuters indexing products (the Emerging Sources Citation Index, beginning with volume 2 in 2016) brought it into the Web of Science ecosystem early in its life, and the journal subsequently entered the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). Scopus coverage began with the 2019 volume year, and the journal received its first Journal Citation Reports impact factor in the 2021 release cycle, entering with a 2020 impact factor of about 5.6. The metric then climbed sharply — to roughly 8.0 for 2021 — before settling in the 6–7 range through the 2023 and 2024 cycles, reflecting strong but increasingly normalized citation demand across the AI publishing boom.

Editorial leadership has also evolved. The official Springer masthead (verified October 2026) names Yaochu Jin of Westlake University, China, as Editor-in-Chief, supported by an Assistant Editor and an extensive roster of associate editors and editorial board members from institutions on every continent. A Founding / Advisory Editors group — including the KACST president Anas Alfaris, Mo Jamshidi, and Janusz Kacprzyk — preserves continuity with the journal's origins. As of 2026 the journal is publishing its twelfth annual volume, with articles released continuously online.

Editorial Leadership

The current Editor-in-Chief is Yaochu Jin, affiliated with the Trustworthy and General AI Lab in the School of Engineering at Westlake University, Hangzhou, China (contact email jinyaochu@westlake.edu.cn as listed on the official masthead). Jin is a widely cited researcher in evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence, and data-driven optimization, and his appointment connects the journal to the active research front in evolutionary machine learning and trustworthy AI. The masthead also lists Yuping Yan PhD (Westlake University) as Assistant Editor.

Continuity with the journal's founding is maintained through the Founding / Advisory Editors panel: Anas Alfaris (President, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh), Mo Jamshidi (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at San Antonio), and Prof. Janusz Kacprzyk (Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) — the latter a major figure in fuzzy systems and computational intelligence, fitting the journal's remit.

The working editorial machinery is large: the official masthead lists roughly eighty Associate Editors and a further Editorial Board, drawn from institutions including the University of Oxford, ETH Zurich, the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, the University of Manchester, the University of Technology Sydney, and many universities across China, Brazil, Malaysia, India, Iran, Turkey, and Nigeria. This geographic breadth reflects the journal's genuinely international author base and its role as a venue for the global computational-intelligence community.

Aims and Scope

Per the official Springer overview, Complex & Intelligent Systems focuses on the cross-fertilization of complex systems, computational simulation, and intelligent analytics and visualization, providing a platform for transdisciplinary research that addresses complex societal problems. The journal's topic map, as presented by Springer, is organized around three pillars (paraphrased from the publisher's scope statement):

• Complexity — complex evolutionary and adaptive systems; emergent properties and behavior in complex systems; self-organizing collective systems; biological and social inspirations in problem solving; systems science and engineering.
• Intelligent Data Analytics — data mining and knowledge discovery; machine learning; pattern recognition; big data analytics and data science; data-driven problem solving.
• Computational Simulation — knowledge-based systems; agent-based systems; uncertainty modeling; decision support systems; brain-like computing; ubiquitous computing; computational visualization and interaction.

The Directory of Open Access Journals classifies the journal's subject coverage with the keywords artificial intelligence, computational simulation, complex systems, and intelligent data analytics, and places it in Library of Congress classes for computer science and information technology. Scopus and SCImago subject categories include Artificial Intelligence (Q1), Computational Mathematics (Q1), Engineering (miscellaneous, Q1), and Information Systems (Q1). Article types are predominantly Original Articles; the journal also runs topical Collections (special issues) — examples active in 2026 include collections on AI and large language models for precision healthcare, multimodal perception and foundation models, and attention and generative foundation models for multimodal perception and forecasting.

Editorial and Peer-Review Process

All submissions to Complex & Intelligent Systems undergo a double-blind peer review process, a fact stated explicitly on the journal's official overview page. Double-blind review means reviewers do not know the identities of the authors and vice versa, a design intended to reduce bias related to seniority, institution, or geography. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and states a commitment to upholding the integrity of the scientific record.

The Directory of Open Access Journals reports that the journal checks submissions for plagiarism and estimates an average of 21 weeks from submission to publication — a figure that includes peer review, revision, and production. Authors should treat this as a long-run average rather than a guarantee, since turnaround varies with the number of revision rounds and reviewer availability. The journal's accepted manuscripts are assigned DOIs, published continuously online, and archived in CLOCKSS and Portico, so the version of record is permanently preserved even if the publisher's platform were ever discontinued.

Springer Nature's standard publishing policies apply: authors must comply with research ethics, data availability, and authorship requirements; image manipulation is screened; and the publisher's open research policies encourage the sharing of code and data. Manuscripts are submitted through Springer's online submission system, linked from the journal homepage.

Journal Metrics and Rankings

Because metrics from different databases measure different things and are released on different schedules, it is worth distinguishing the three headline figures and their sources (all values below were reported by third-party aggregators in 2026; the Journal Citation Reports and Scopus official releases are the primary sources).

• Journal Impact Factor (JCR, 2024): about 6.9. SciJournal, aggregating Journal Citation Reports data, reports a 2024 impact factor of 6.930 (down from 7.462 in 2022 and 7.965 in 2021), placing the journal in the top roughly 7% of all journals with an impact factor and the top 15% among computer science journals. A separate Scopus-based "impact score" of 6.87 for 2024 is reported by Resurchify — conceptually similar (average citations per recent article) but computed from Scopus rather than Web of Science data.
• CiteScore (Scopus, 2024 release): 9.6. A Scopus-indexed journal list reports a CiteScore of 9.6 for the journal, ranking it at the 96th percentile (7th of 189) in Computational Mathematics, with a SNIP of 1.876 and SJR of 1.321 on that release. CiteScore uses a four-year citation window and is released annually by Elsevier.
• SJR and quartiles: 1.143, Q1. Resurchify, citing SCImago, reports an SJR of 1.143 for 2024 and a best quartile of Q1 across all four Scopus categories (Artificial Intelligence; Computational Mathematics; Engineering, miscellaneous; Information Systems).
• h-index: aggregators differ — SciJournal reports 73 while Resurchify reports 59 (Scopus-based). Journal h-indices vary by database and cutoff date, so the range 59–73 is the honest statement.

The longer trajectory is instructive: the journal's impact factor rose from roughly 5.6 at entry to about 8.0 by 2021, then moderated to the 6–7 band — a pattern shared by many AI journals that saw citation inflation during the deep-learning boom followed by stabilization as publication volumes grew across the field.

Submission Guidelines

Authors considering Complex & Intelligent Systems should know the following practical points, compiled from the journal's official Springer pages and the DOAJ record:

• Scope fit matters most. Manuscripts should engage the journal's core triad — complex systems, computational simulation, intelligent analytics — or apply those methods to a substantive problem. Pure application papers with no methodological or systems-science contribution, and pure theory papers with no connection to computation or intelligence, are weaker fits.
• Language and length. Manuscripts are accepted in English. Springer provides formatting templates; the journal publishes substantial original articles, and there is no rigid page limit, though clarity and concision are expected.
• Double-blind preparation. Because review is double-blind, manuscripts must be anonymized before submission — remove author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, and any self-identifying references from the main text and file metadata.
• Ethics and originality. Submissions are checked for plagiarism; the journal follows COPE guidelines on duplicate publication, authorship, and conflicts of interest. Prior posting as a preprint is generally compatible with Springer policies, but authors should check the current version of the policy.
• Special collections. The journal regularly opens themed collections (see examples above). Submitting to a relevant collection can route the paper to guest editors working on that topic, but standard peer-review criteria apply.
• Timeline. DOAJ's long-run estimate is about 21 weeks from submission to publication; authors should plan for two or more revision rounds and check the current average on the journal page.

Open Access and Article Processing Charges

Complex & Intelligent Systems is a fully open access journal: every article is freely available to read online without subscription, and the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (which records that it began publishing open access in 2015). Articles are published under Creative Commons licenses — DOAJ records the options as CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND — and are assigned permanent DOIs and archived in CLOCKSS and Portico.

The publication business model rests on an article processing charge (APC) paid on acceptance. Per the journal's official "How to publish with us" page (accessed October 2026), the current APC is £1,890 GBP / $2,590 USD / €2,190 EUR, subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable; the price is fixed at the date of acceptance. This figure matches the DOAJ record, which lists maximum charges of 2,190 EUR / 2,590 USD / 1,890 GBP and notes a waiver policy.

Two cost-relief mechanisms are worth noting. First, Springer Nature offers APC waivers and discounts for corresponding authors based in the world's lowest-income countries, plus discretionary case-by-case consideration for financial need — waiver requests must be made at submission, not after acceptance. Second, the journal is included in India's ONOS (One Nation One Subscription) sponsorship program, which supports APC costs for authors from India. Historically, the journal's fees were sponsored outright by KACST so that authors published free of charge; authors should rely on the current published APC and waiver terms rather than older announcements.

Notable Articles and Research Themes

Rather than inventing a citation ranking, this section notes representative articles and recurring themes drawn from the journal's published content (titles and authors verified from Springer article pages, 2026):

• Metaheuristic and evolutionary optimization is a signature theme. A representative example is "EPICS: error-preserved and interpolation-corrected surrogate-assisted particle swarm optimization for complex optimization" (Jiang, Pan, Chu, Sun, Snášel, 2025), and "Surrogate-assisted sine Phasmatodea population evolution algorithm applied to 3D coverage of mobile nodes" (Chu et al., 2024) — the latter illustrating the journal's interest in optimization applied to wireless sensor networks.
• Medical and healthcare AI has grown into a major strand, including "Uncertainty-aware evidential deep learning for reliable stroke detection and clinical decision support" (Saleem et al., 2026), "FedMed-LoRA: a federated parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework with dual LoRA for medical multi-organ segmentation" (Zhou et al., 2026), "XCardioPulmoNet: an explainable attention-guided residual framework for cardiopulmonary disease detection" (Nagro & Helal, 2026), and "Explainable and secure framework for autism prediction using multimodal eye tracking and kinematic data" (2025) — reflecting the themed collection on AI and large language models for precision healthcare.
• Generative AI and foundation models are now prominent: "A multi-agent collaborative framework for style-guided knowledge reorganization of scientific source texts" (Zheng et al., 2026) and "Triple collaborative asymmetric deep hashing for multi-label image retrieval" (Wang & Cui, 2026) show the journal absorbing the LLM and multimodal-model wave.
• Complex-systems modeling in the classical sense persists: "Replicability of agent-based simulations: a case study with a SEIRS epidemiological model" (Antunes, Havion & Duboz, 2026) exemplifies the agent-based simulation pillar of the scope.
• Biomedical engineering and imaging, e.g., "Monocular tissue reconstruction via remote center motion for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery" (2021), shows the journal's reach into robotics and surgical technology.

Across these threads, a pattern is visible: the journal functions as a high-throughput, open-access home for computational-intelligence research — evolutionary algorithms, fuzzy systems, deep learning, and complex-systems modeling — with a fast-growing applied wing in healthcare AI.

Abstracting and Indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in an unusually broad set of services for its age, as listed on the official Springer page:

• Web of Science: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE); Current Contents / Engineering, Computing and Technology.
• Scopus (with SCImago coverage and Q1 quartiles).
• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals).
• EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale, Dimensions, INSPEC, Google Scholar.
• Regional and discovery services: Baidu, CNKI, CNPIEC, Naver, Wanfang, eLibrary.ru, Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST), OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service, Ovid Discovery, TD Net Discovery Service, Chinese Academy of Medical Science (CAMS).
• Preservation: CLOCKSS and Portico.

The combination of SCIE + Scopus + DOAJ coverage means the journal satisfies the indexing requirements of most institutional, funder, and national research-assessment systems; its absence from none of the major selective databases is itself a signal of editorial selectivity and publication ethics compliance (predatory outlets are routinely excluded from these indexes).

Key Facts at a Glance

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Complex & Intelligent Systems a legitimate journal?

Yes. It is published by Springer Nature, is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus, is listed in the DOAJ, follows COPE publication-ethics guidelines, and uses double-blind peer review. These are the standard markers of a legitimate scholarly journal.

Who publishes Complex & Intelligent Systems?

Springer Nature, through Springer International Publishing AG, under the SpringerOpen open-access brand.

When was the journal founded?

It began publishing in 2015 as an open-access journal, initially with open-access-fee support from the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia.

Who is the current Editor-in-Chief?

Yaochu Jin of Westlake University, Hangzhou, China, per the official Springer masthead verified in October 2026. Founding/advisory editors include Anas Alfaris, Mo Jamshidi, and Janusz Kacprzyk.

What is the journal's impact factor?

The 2024 Journal Impact Factor is approximately 6.9 (6.930 in JCR-derived aggregation), with a Scopus CiteScore of 9.6 and SJR of 1.143 (Q1). Metric values vary slightly between databases and release cycles.

Is the journal open access, and what does it cost to publish?

Fully open access. The current article processing charge is £1,890 / $2,590 / €2,190, set at acceptance. Waivers and discounts exist for authors from low-income countries and cases of financial need; authors in India may be covered by the ONOS sponsorship program.

What are the ISSNs?

Print ISSN 2199-4536 and online ISSN 2198-6053.

What peer-review model does it use?

Double-blind peer review for all submissions, with plagiarism screening. DOAJ's long-run estimate is about 21 weeks from submission to publication.

What topics does the journal cover?

The intersection of complex systems, computational simulation, and intelligent analytics/visualization: machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, big data, evolutionary and swarm optimization, fuzzy systems, agent-based modeling, decision support, brain-like computing, and related areas.

Is it indexed in Web of Science and Scopus?

Yes — in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) and in Scopus, plus the DOAJ, EBSCO, INSPEC, Google Scholar, and Current Contents, among others.

How often is it published?

It publishes annual volumes (Volume 12 in 2026) with articles released continuously online as they are accepted. Third-party directories describe its frequency as bi-monthly; the official Springer page does not state a fixed issue schedule.

Can I submit a review or survey paper?

The journal's early volumes featured invited surveys, and it runs topical collections. Check the current calls for papers on the Springer journal page and confirm scope fit with the editors before submitting a review article.

Where do I submit a manuscript?

Through Springer's online submission system, linked from the official journal page at link.springer.com/journal/40747. Prepare an anonymized manuscript for double-blind review.

References and Sources

• Complex & Intelligent Systems — official journal overview page, Springer Nature: https://link.springer.com/journal/40747
• Editorial board masthead, Complex & Intelligent Systems: https://link.springer.com/journal/40747/editorial-board
• "How to publish with us" (fees and funding / APC), Complex & Intelligent Systems: https://link.springer.com/journal/40747/how-to-publish-with-us
• Complex & Intelligent Systems — Directory of Open Access Journals: https://doaj.org/toc/2198-6053
• Complex and Intelligent Systems — journal metrics, SciJournal: https://www.scijournal.org/complex-and-intelligent-systems
• Complex and Intelligent Systems — impact factor and ranking details, Resurchify: https://www.resurchify.com/impact/details/21101095931
• Complex and Intelligent Systems — journal metrics, Research.com: https://research.com/journal/complex-intelligent-systems
• Complex & Intelligent Systems — Springer Professional background page: https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/complex-intelligent-systems/11853576
• SafetyLit journal page (ISSN and publication history): https://www.safetylit.org/week/journalpage.php?jid=27889
• Representative article pages on SpringerLink: EPICS (doi:10.1007/s40747-025-01947-0), autism prediction framework (doi:10.1007/s40747-025-01790-3), monocular tissue reconstruction (doi:10.1007/s40747-021-00485-9).