IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

About IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine: A Magazine, Not a Transactions Journal

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine (abbreviated in citations as IEEE Consum. Electron. Mag.) is a peer-reviewed magazine published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, through the IEEE Consumer Technology Society. Its print ISSN is 2162-2248 and its electronic ISSN is 2162-2256 — the same pair carried in the JournalsWorld record (350618) and in IEEE's own title list. That distinction, magazine rather than archival transactions journal, shapes everything else in this profile. A magazine in the IEEE system is written to be read across a broad engineering audience: it explains, surveys, teaches and connects, as well as reporting new work. Readers who approach it expecting the dense, theorem-first register of IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics — the society's separate, older archival journal — will misjudge both titles. The magazine is the flagship, outward-facing periodical of the consumer technology community; the Transactions is its research archive. Keeping those two roles separate is the first step to using either title well.

The magazine's own call for papers describes it, in IEEE's words, as the award-winning flagship magazine of the IEEE Consumer Technology Society, publishing peer-reviewed articles that present emerging trends, key insights, tutorials, practical experiences, design work and industry-related research and developments in mainstream consumer electronic products, technologies and related fields, for the membership of the society and for a broad engineering audience. It states its purpose plainly: to educate and, in its own phrasing, to entertain, on general topics related to consumer technologies and electronic products. That combination — rigour with readability — is unusual, deliberate, and demanding for authors. A successful article must survive peer review and still be intelligible, and interesting, to an engineer whose specialty lies two sub-fields away.

At a Glance

Two cautions belong beside any quick-facts table. First, fee, editor and turnaround information for IEEE magazines is handled through IEEE's current author and periodical pages and through the society; where a figure is not publicly disclosed on those official pages at the time of writing, this profile says so rather than filling the gap with a directory estimate. Second, metrics change annually. The figures discussed below are attributed to the specific IEEE title list that reports them, with its date, so that a reader can replace them when a newer list appears instead of treating any single number as a permanent property of the magazine.

History and Place in the IEEE Consumer Technology Society

The society behind the magazine began as the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society and is now the IEEE Consumer Technology Society — a renaming that itself tells the story of the field, from devices in the living room to technology woven through homes, vehicles, health, entertainment and cities. IEEE's society pages describe a community whose field of interest is the engineering and research aspects of the theory, design, construction, manufacture and end use of mass-market electronics, systems, software and services for consumers. Within that community the magazine sits alongside IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, society conferences — above all the IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics, held in Las Vegas in the orbit of the Consumer Electronics Show — and a network of local chapters around the world.

The magazine in its present form dates from 2012, which IEEE's STEM journals collection lists as its start year. It arrived at a moment when consumer technology was changing character: the smartphone had collapsed a dozen separate products into one networked device, television was becoming a software platform, and the home was filling with connected sensors and appliances. A transactions journal can document that change paper by paper, but a field also needs a venue that steps back and explains it: what a new video codec means in practice, how a smart-city deployment actually behaves, why a security failure in a consumer device matters beyond one product line. The magazine was built for that explanatory, cross-cutting role, and its early issues — including widely read pieces on the history of the television remote control and on new video compression standards — show the formula working: technically serious, historically aware and written for readers, not only for specialists in the exact sub-topic.

Its standing has been recognised inside the technical-communication world as well. Society histories note that the magazine received an Apex Grand Award for excellence in writing in 2013 and a regional Society for Technical Communication award of excellence in 2016. Those are writing awards, not citation awards, and that is precisely the point: they reward the magazine for doing the magazine job — clarity, structure and engagement — at a standard that research journals rarely aim for and almost never achieve.

Scope: The Topic List, Read Carefully

The magazine's call for papers gives a topic list that is the best single statement of its scope. Read it as a map of consumer technology as the society currently defines it:

• Application-specific consumer electronics for smart cities — sensing, services and infrastructure aimed at urban life.
• Audio and video systems and signal processing — the magazine's historic core: capture, compression, delivery and reproduction of sound and image.
• Automotive consumer electronics applications — in-vehicle infotainment, driver interfaces and the consumer side of connected vehicles.
• Consumer communications networks and connectivity — home and personal networks, wireless links and the protocols that hold a household of devices together.
• Consumer power and energy — batteries, charging, energy use and efficiency in everyday devices.
• Consumer systems for healthcare and wellbeing — wearables, home health monitoring and wellness technology used outside clinical walls.
• Entertainment and gaming — games, interactive media and the platforms that deliver them.
• Human-machine interaction and user experience — how ordinary people, not only engineers, meet these systems.
• Internet of Things, Internet of Everywhere and edge computing — connected devices and computation placed near the user and the sensor.
• Machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence in consumer electronics — models running in products, with product constraints on data, power and latency.
• Quantum in consumer technology — an emerging heading that signals where the society expects future consumer impact.
• Security and privacy of consumer hardware and software systems — protection for devices that live in homes and pockets and are rarely administered by professionals.
• Sensors and actuators — the physical interface between consumer products and the world.
• Smartphone and mobile device technologies — the central consumer platform of the last two decades.
• Virtual reality, augmented reality and the metaverse — immersive systems and their consumer uses.

Three patterns matter for authors. First, almost every heading is application-led: the question is not only whether a technique works, but what it does in a product that must be cheap, robust, updateable and usable by a non-expert. Second, the list is deliberately current; headings such as edge computing, AI in consumer devices and quantum in consumer technology mark areas where the magazine wants tutorial and perspective pieces early, before the literature hardens. Third, the boundaries are real. Work with no consumer setting — a purely industrial control method, a backbone-network result with no path to a consumer product, a clinical system intended only for hospital professionals — belongs in a sister IEEE title, and editors will say so. The strongest fit test is simple: could a thoughtful engineer outside your sub-field explain, after reading your abstract, why a consumer, a product team or the consumer-technology community should care?

What the Magazine Publishes

Because it is a magazine, the article types differ from a transactions journal. Its call invites research and review articles, and its pages mix several recognisable forms. There are feature articles that survey or advance a topic for a broad readership; tutorials that teach a method, standard or technology step by step; accounts of practical experience and design, where the lessons of building and deploying a real product are the contribution; industry-related research and development reports that connect laboratory work to market and manufacturing reality; and shorter society and community material that keeps members in touch with conferences, chapters, awards and people. Historical and retrospective pieces also belong here in a way they rarely do in a transactions journal — consumer electronics has a rich, well documented past, and the magazine treats explaining that past as part of explaining the present.

That mix changes how a manuscript should be written. Background cannot be skipped or compressed into citations; for many readers your article is their first serious encounter with the topic, and the magazine expects you to bring them with you. Figures carry more weight than in an archival paper: a clear system diagram, a photograph or rendering of a device in use, or a timeline of a technology's evolution can do explanatory work that paragraphs cannot. Mathematics is welcome where it earns its place, but it must be motivated and interpreted, not left to speak for itself. And the practical section — constraints, costs, standards, failures, what you would do differently — is often the most cited and most remembered part of a magazine article, because it is the part readers cannot get from a data sheet or a research abstract.

Metrics and Standing, With Sources and Dates

IEEE publishes a title list that reports citation metrics for its periodicals. In IEEE's Title List (January 2026, revised), IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine is listed as a subscription-access magazine indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, with a Journal Impact Factor of 4.1, a five-year impact factor of 3.4 and an Eigenfactor-related set of indicators that the list gives alongside (article influence 0.554 in that list). Readers should quote those numbers with their source and year — IEEE updates the list, and a figure copied without a date quickly becomes misinformation. Secondary services that summarise SCImago data have reported, for earlier years, an SJR in the region of 0.9 and category positions spanning electrical and electronic engineering, computer science applications, hardware and architecture and human-computer interaction, with the best category position in the top quartile in that reporting. Category positions differ because the magazine genuinely sits across categories; a single quartile label, without the category named, describes this title badly.

What do those numbers mean in practice? For a magazine, citation metrics understate readership and professional influence. Magazine articles are read by practising engineers who may use an idea in a product without ever publishing a citing paper, taught in courses, and circulated inside companies. A tutorial that becomes the standard introduction to a codec, a sensor technique or a security practice can shape a field for years on a citation count that looks modest beside a hot research topic. Conversely, the magazine's most cited pieces show that magazine form and citation impact are not enemies: its article “Everything You Wanted to Know About Smart Cities” and its explanation of HEVC video compression — “HEVC: The New Gold Standard for Video Compression” — accumulated hundreds of citations in the summaries of the title's most cited papers, and a piece on mobile-edge computing architecture and the Internet of Things is in the same leading group. The lesson for authors is that a clear, timely, well titled synthesis, published where the whole community reads, can out-cite narrower research reports in larger journals.

Indexing follows from the publisher and the title list: the magazine is covered in the Web of Science Core Collection through SCIE, as IEEE's list states, and its articles are delivered and indexed through IEEE Xplore, the platform on which IEEE periodical content is searched, cited and preserved. Authors should verify current coverage in the exact service their institution or funder names, on the day they need it, because index coverage lists are maintained by those services, not by this profile.

How Peer Review and Submission Work in Practice

Submission is through IEEE's manuscript systems for the magazine, under the author guidelines in its call for papers; prospective authors should read the current call, because special sections and themed issues — a regular feature of magazine publishing — carry their own deadlines, guest editors and topic statements. A manuscript that fits a special section should say so and should be written for that section's stated audience; a general submission should make its broad relevance obvious in the first page, not only in the cover letter.

Peer review for a magazine asks two questions at once: is this correct and original enough, and is it told well enough for this readership? Reviewers can therefore legitimately ask for restructuring, for added explanation, for better figures and for the removal of jargon, in a way that would be unusual in a transactions review, where clarity comments are usually secondary. Authors who treat such requests as cosmetic, and resubmit the same dense text with a new introduction, usually fail at the second round. Build the revision around the reader: add the worked example, redraw the diagram, define the term at first use, and state the product or user consequence of each technical claim. Length discipline matters too; magazine pages are a shared, finite resource, and an editor who accepts a long article is declining others. Write to the length the current guidelines specify, and treat references as a curated reading list for a newcomer — the key sources, the standard, the best survey — rather than an exhaustive bibliography of your sub-field.

Ethical and practical IEEE rules apply in full: originality, proper citation of prior work including your own, disclosure of conflicts, and the IEEE rules on preprints and on the use of generative tools, all of which are stated in IEEE's current author guidance and should be checked there rather than summarised second-hand here. Product and company claims need special care in this magazine: because many authors work in industry, editors and readers rely on clear affiliation, on separating measured results from market projection, and on avoiding language that reads as advertising for a named product. A magazine that engineers trust cannot be a brochure, and its review process guards that line.

Who Reads It, and Who Should Write for It

The natural readership is the membership of the IEEE Consumer Technology Society plus the far larger circle of engineers, product designers, standards participants, researchers and students who work on consumer-facing technology without belonging to the society. That readership explains the magazine's value to different kinds of author. An academic with a mature result gains a translation channel: the same work that appears in technical form elsewhere can be explained here to the community that might build with it. An industry engineer gains a peer-reviewed venue in which design experience, deployment lessons and standards work — contributions that transactions journals often undervalue — are the explicit point. A researcher entering a new consumer area gains, as a reader, a curated map: a handful of magazine features will orient them faster than fifty abstracts.

Students and early-career engineers benefit in a particular way. Reading the magazine regularly is a low-cost education in how the field talks to itself: which problems are considered solved, which are considered open, which standards matter, which product categories are rising. Writing for it is a stricter education in the same skill. If you can explain your work in this magazine's register — accurate, structured, illustrated, honest about limits — you can explain it to a manager, a standards committee, a funder or a customer, and that is a career skill that outlasts any single paper.

Distinguishing Similar Titles

Three confusions recur and are worth settling in one place. First, IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine is not IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics: same society, overlapping scope, different genre, different ISSNs, different expectations — magazine 2162-2248 / 2162-2256, written to explain and connect; the Transactions is the archival research journal with its own, older history reaching back to broadcast and television receiver work in the 1950s. Citing one when you mean the other is a bibliographic error that propagates through reference lists, so check the title on the article itself. Second, the magazine is not a consumer magazine in the newsstand sense: it is not reviewing gadgets for shoppers, rating products or carrying buying advice. Its “consumer” names its subject — technology for mass-market use — not its readership, which is professional. Third, its society's name has modernised from Consumer Electronics Society to Consumer Technology Society; older articles, awards and conference records under the older name refer to the same community, and searches that use only the new name will miss that history.

Using This Profile, and Checking the Record

Identity was checked three ways for this profile: the JournalsWorld live record gives the title, publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and ISSNs 21622248 and 21622256; IEEE's own title list gives the same title with ISSNs 2162-2248 and 2162-2256, subscription access, SCIE coverage and the metrics reported above; and the magazine's call for papers gives the same title, the society relationship and the scope used here. No conflicting identity was found. Two structured-field limits should be noted from the live JournalsWorld page: its editor and article-processing-charge fields are shown in a form that does not name a current editor or a fee, and this profile therefore names neither — IEEE magazines handle editorship and any charges through current IEEE pages, and a directory entry should not invent them. The country field on the live page is likewise unfilled; the publisher and society are United States based, as IEEE's listings reflect, but readers who need a formal country-of-publication statement should take it from IEEE or a library catalogue, not infer it from this paragraph.

Before submitting, citing or subscribing, go to the primary sources: the magazine's current call for papers and author guidelines for scope, length and special sections; IEEE Xplore for the articles themselves and for the authoritative version of record; and IEEE's latest title list for metrics. Directory profiles, including this one, are maps. The territory is the magazine — bimonthly, peer-reviewed, deliberately readable, and occupying a niche no other IEEE title fills: the place where consumer technology explains itself to the engineers who build it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine a journal or a magazine?

It is an IEEE magazine: peer-reviewed like a journal, but written in magazine form — features, tutorials, practical experience and perspectives for a broad engineering audience — rather than as an archival transactions journal.

What are its ISSNs?

Print ISSN 2162-2248 and electronic ISSN 2162-2256, as given in IEEE's title list and in the JournalsWorld record.

Who publishes it?

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, through the IEEE Consumer Technology Society, whose flagship magazine it is.

What impact factor is reported for it?

IEEE's Title List (January 2026, revised) reports an impact factor of 4.1 and a five-year impact factor of 3.4. Quote metrics with that source and date, and check for a newer list before relying on them.

Does it charge to publish or to read?

IEEE's title list describes access as subscription based. Any current author-side charge position should be confirmed on IEEE's current author pages; it is not publicly disclosed in the sources used for this profile in a form this profile will state as a fee figure, so no figure is given here.