IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine

About IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine

About IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine

IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (CIM) is the flagship magazine of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS), the IEEE society dedicated to the theory, design, application, and development of biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms. Published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in the United States, the magazine has served since 2006 as the principal communications and education channel between the society's governing body and its worldwide membership.

Each quarterly issue blends long-form feature articles, tutorial surveys, technology reviews, book and software reviews, society news, and opinion pieces. The magazine's readership spans academic researchers, industry practitioners, educators, and students working across the core pillars of computational intelligence: neural networks, fuzzy systems, and evolutionary computation — plus their modern extensions into deep learning, swarm intelligence, artificial life, and intelligent systems.

Unlike IEEE CIS's Transactions journals, which archive original research contributions, CIM's articles are written to be read: they explain, synthesize, and contextualize. Its best-known pieces are authoritative surveys and historical overviews that have become standard references in the field — the kind of articles instructors assign to new graduate students and that newcomers read first to get oriented in a subfield.

The magazine covers the three classical pillars of computational intelligence — neural networks (including deep learning), fuzzy systems, and evolutionary computation — together with swarm intelligence, artificial life, intelligent agents, hybrid intelligent systems, and computational-intelligence applications across engineering, science, medicine, and the social sciences. This breadth is deliberate: the magazine is the one IEEE CIS publication that the entire society membership shares, so its content is written to cross subfield boundaries rather than to speak only to specialists.

In IEEE publishing culture, magazines occupy a distinct niche. They are the venue where the field explains itself — where a breakthrough in one corner of the discipline gets translated for everyone else, where the history of a technique gets written down while its pioneers are still active, and where debates about the field's direction play out in opinion columns and editorials. IEEE CIM has played exactly this role for computational intelligence for two decades, complementing the deep but narrow archival record of the Transactions with readable, high-level accounts of where the field has been and where it is going.

History of the Magazine

IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine was founded in 2006, with its first issue appearing in February 2006. The founding Editor-in-Chief was Prof. Gary G. Yen of Oklahoma State University (USA), who established the magazine's editorial identity: tutorial-rich, community-oriented content that bridges research and practice.

The magazine launched at a formative moment for the field. The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society — which originated as the IEEE Neural Networks Council and adopted its current name in the early 2000s to reflect a scope broadened beyond neural networks to fuzzy systems and evolutionary computation — was still a young society, and the first IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence had been held only a few years earlier in 2002. CIM gave this fast-growing society its shared editorial voice: a place for the society's leadership to communicate with members and for the community's ideas to reach beyond conference proceedings.

The magazine's debut year produced two of its most enduring articles. In the very first volume (vol. 1, no. 1), Carlos A. Coello Coello published "Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization: A Historical View of the Field", a historical survey that remains one of the most-cited articles in the magazine's history. Later that same year (vol. 1, no. 4), Marco Dorigo, Mauro Birattari, and Thomas Stützle contributed "Ant Colony Optimization: Artificial Ants as a Computational Intelligence Technique", an accessible tutorial on the ant-colony metaheuristic that introduced the technique to a broad audience.

Leadership of the magazine has since passed through a succession of prominent figures in computational intelligence:

• Gary G. Yen (Oklahoma State University, USA) — Founding Editor-in-Chief, from 2006
• Kay Chen Tan (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong) — Past Editor-in-Chief
• Hisao Ishibuchi (formerly Osaka Prefecture University, Japan; Southern University of Science and Technology, China) — Past Editor-in-Chief
• Chuan-Kang Ting (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) — Past Editor-in-Chief
• Min Jiang (Xiamen University, China) — Editor-in-Chief beginning January 1, 2026

The appointment of Prof. Min Jiang was announced by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, noting his research in evolutionary computation, learning-driven optimization, and AI for Science, along with his extensive editorial service as an Associate Editor of CIM itself. In 2026 the magazine enters its 20th year of publication, marking two decades of continuous quarterly publication — a significant milestone for a society magazine.

Aims & Scope

According to the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society's official Information for Authors, the magazine "publishes peer-reviewed articles that present emerging novel discoveries, important insights, or tutorial surveys in all areas of computational intelligence design and applications, in keeping with the Field of Interest of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE/CIS). Additionally, CIM serves as a media of communications between the governing body and its membership of IEEE/CIS."

Authors are explicitly encouraged to submit papers on:

• Application-oriented developments — real deployments and case studies of CI techniques
• Successful industrial implementations — how computational intelligence works in industry
• Design tools — software, platforms, and tooling for CI practitioners
• Technology reviews — critical assessments of methods and technologies
• Computational intelligence education — pedagogy, curricula, and educational resources
• Applied research — research with a clear applied or explanatory dimension

Contributions should contain novel and previously unpublished material. The novelty will usually lie in original concepts, results, techniques, observations, hardware/software implementations, or applications, but may also provide syntheses or new insights into previously reported research. Surveys and expository submissions are welcome. Material previously copyrighted, published, or accepted for publication elsewhere is generally not considered; conference records and book chapters that have already been published are acceptable only if significantly enhanced. In exceptional circumstances, the Editor-in-Chief may exempt a noteworthy contribution from this policy.

Typical article types in each issue include feature articles and tutorials (the long-form technical core of the magazine), guest editorials introducing special issues, book and software reviews, society briefs (news from the IEEE CIS governing body), and opinion or "reflections" columns from community leaders.

Editorial Leadership

The magazine is led by an Editor-in-Chief supported by an editorial board of associate editors, editors-at-large, and regular columns editors. The board structure visible in recent issues includes a Founding Editor-in-Chief (Gary G. Yen), past Editors-in-Chief who remain connected to the magazine, several Editors-at-Large (senior community figures), and a team of Associate Editors covering the magazine's breadth.

Current Editor-in-Chief: Prof. Min Jiang, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Xiamen University, China, and Director of the Intelligent Multimedia Laboratory. He assumed the role on January 1, 2026. His research spans evolutionary computation and learning-driven optimization, as well as physics-informed and neuro-symbolic machine learning for AI for Science. He has authored more than 100 publications, edited special issues and a conference-proceedings volume, served as Associate Editor of CIM, the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, and chaired the IEEE CIS Intelligent Systems and Applications Technical Committee. His recognitions include the Stanford/Elsevier World's Top 2% Scientists listing (2023, 2024) and the IEEE CIM Outstanding Paper Award (2024).

Past Editors-in-Chief, in order of service: Gary G. Yen (founding; Oklahoma State University), Kay Chen Tan (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Hisao Ishibuchi (Osaka Prefecture University / Southern University of Science and Technology), and Chuan-Kang Ting (National Tsing Hua University). Editors-at-large listed in recent issues have included Piero P. Bonissone, David B. Fogel, Vincenzo Piuri, Marios M. Polycarpou, and Jacek M. Zurada.

Key Facts

Metrics & Indexing

The magazine is indexed in the major scientific databases, including Scopus (coverage 2006–present) and the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). Its SCImago indicators include an H-index of 78 and an SJR of 1.58 (2025), placing it in Q1 in both Artificial Intelligence and Theoretical Computer Science categories.

A note on the Impact Factor: several third-party metric aggregators publish a Journal Impact Factor for this magazine, but the figures disagree with each other (values ranging from around 7 to above 11 in different listings). Because no single officially verified JCR figure could be confirmed from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports at the time of writing, we do not state a definitive Impact Factor here — consult the current JCR release directly for the authoritative value.

Because IEEE magazines publish fewer, longer, and more widely-read articles than typical journals — surveys and tutorials that accumulate citations over many years — citation metrics for CIM behave differently from those of archival research journals, and should be interpreted in that context.

Access & Membership

Full text of the magazine's articles is available through the IEEE Xplore Digital Library, where each article carries a DOI under the prefix 10.1109/MCI. Institutional subscribers and IEEE members with Xplore access can read current and archived issues (2006–present) there.

Members of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society receive the magazine as part of their society membership — CIM is, by design, the society's channel of communication with its members. Non-members can access individual articles through IEEE Xplore, typically on a pay-per-view basis or via institutional subscriptions. IEEE offers reduced-price electronic subscriptions for society members, consistent with how it distributes its other society magazines.

Authors submit manuscripts through the IEEE Author Portal at ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/cim-ieee. All IEEE publications require an ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) for every author at submission. Manuscripts must be printable with all fonts embedded to enter the review process, and authors can track manuscript status through the portal.

Notable Articles

The following are among the magazine's most-cited and most-influential articles. All DOIs below were verified from independent citation records — no DOIs are invented.

• Carlos A. Coello Coello, "Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization: A Historical View of the Field," IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 28–36, 2006. DOI: 10.1109/MCI.2006.1597059
  A historical survey of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, published in the magazine's very first issue, that became a standard reference for the field.
• Marco Dorigo, Mauro Birattari, and Thomas Stützle, "Ant Colony Optimization: Artificial Ants as a Computational Intelligence Technique," IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 28–39, 2006. DOI: 10.1109/MCI.2006.329691
  An accessible tutorial on ant colony optimization by three of its leading researchers — one of the magazine's most-cited articles overall.
• Erik Cambria and Bebo White, "Jumping NLP Curves: A Review of Natural Language Processing Research [Review Article]," IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 48–57, 2014. DOI: 10.1109/MCI.2014.2307227
  A widely cited review of natural language processing research that bridged the CI community with NLP.
• Erik Cambria et al., "Sentiment Big Data Flow Analysis by Means of Dynamic Linguistic Patterns," IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, 2015. DOI: 10.1109/MCI.2015.2471215
  A methodology combining computational intelligence, linguistics, and common-sense computing for concept-level sentiment analysis of big social data.
• Tom Young, Devamanyu Hazarika, Soujanya Poria, and Erik Cambria, "Recent Trends in Deep Learning Based Natural Language Processing [Review Article]," IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 55–75, Aug. 2018. DOI: 10.1109/MCI.2018.2840738
  A landmark survey comparing deep-learning NLP architectures with traditional machine-learning approaches — among the magazine's most-cited papers of the deep-learning era.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine a peer-reviewed journal?
No. It is a magazine published by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. Its articles are editorially evaluated and, per the society's official description, peer-reviewed articles presenting discoveries, insights, or tutorial surveys — but the publication's mission is education and communication (tutorials, surveys, features, reviews), not archival reporting of original research. If you need a peer-reviewed journal venue for a research paper, consider the IEEE CIS Transactions journals instead.

What is the difference between this magazine and the IEEE CIS Transactions journals?
The Transactions (Neural Networks and Learning Systems, Evolutionary Computation, Fuzzy Systems) publish original research papers that advance the state of the art; the magazine publishes feature articles, tutorials, and surveys that explain and synthesize the field for a broad audience. Many researchers read the magazine to stay current and publish in the Transactions to report new results.

Does the magazine publish special issues?
Yes. Special issues on focused topics are a regular feature of the magazine; calls for special-issue proposals and guest-editor teams are announced through the IEEE CIS. Recent years have included special issues on topics such as search-based software engineering and model complexity and regularization, with guest editorials introducing each collection.

Can I get the magazine without being an IEEE CIS member?
Yes — articles are sold individually through IEEE Xplore, and institutions subscribe to Xplore packages that include it. However, society membership is the most economical route for individuals and also connects you to the conferences, chapters, and community the magazine covers.

Who publishes IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine?
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), on behalf of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS). It is published in the United States.

When was the magazine founded?
2006. The first issue appeared in February 2006, and 2026 marks the magazine's 20th year of publication.

How often is it published?
Quarterly — four issues per year (February, May, August, November).

What are the ISSNs?
Print ISSN 1556-603X; online ISSN 1556-6048.

Who is the current Editor-in-Chief?
Prof. Min Jiang of Xiamen University (China), who began his term on January 1, 2026. Previous Editors-in-Chief include founding editor Gary G. Yen (Oklahoma State University), Kay Chen Tan, Hisao Ishibuchi, and Chuan-Kang Ting.

Where can I read the magazine's articles?
Through the IEEE Xplore Digital Library (articles carry DOIs under the 10.1109/MCI prefix). IEEE CIS members receive the magazine as part of their membership.

How do I submit an article?
Manuscripts are submitted through the IEEE Author Portal at ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/cim-ieee. All authors must have a registered ORCID. Note the scope: the magazine seeks feature articles, tutorials, surveys, technology reviews, and applied/educational contributions — not conventional research papers.

What is the magazine's Impact Factor?
We do not publish a figure here because third-party listings disagree and no officially verified JCR value was confirmed at the time of writing. The magazine is indexed in Scopus and Web of Science (SCIE); check the current Clarivate Journal Citation Reports for the authoritative Impact Factor.

What topics does it cover?
All areas of computational intelligence design and applications — neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence, deep learning — with emphasis on tutorials, surveys, applications, industrial implementations, design tools, technology reviews, and CI education, in keeping with the IEEE CIS Field of Interest.