IEEE Power Engineering Review

About IEEE Power Engineering Review

At a Glance

History: Twenty-Two Years of the Review (1981–2002)

The IEEE Power Engineering Review was a periodical published by the IEEE Power Engineering Society that served, for more than two decades, as the Society’s principal digest and news vehicle for practicing power engineers. Its first issue appeared in 1981 as Volume 1, Number 1, and the publication ran without interruption until Volume 22, Number 12, in December 2002 — twenty-two full volumes and roughly two dozen years of continuous publication, documented in IEEE Xplore’s global archive listing of IEEE journals and transactions.

The Society behind the Review is among the oldest parts of the IEEE. It traces its organizational origins to the early years of the Institute itself: it was first formed as the Power Group in 1964, renamed the Power Engineering Society in 1970, and — reflecting the broadening of the field — became the IEEE Power & Energy Society in 2007 (a name change approved by the IEEE Board of Directors). Throughout these organizational transitions, the Society maintained a commitment to serving both the research community and practicing engineers, and the Review reflected that dual audience across its entire publication history.

The era in which the Review lived was a transformative one for the electric power industry. When the first issues appeared in the early 1980s, power systems were dominated by large centralized generation, analog controls, and relatively stable utility business models. By the time the final issue appeared in 2002, the industry had experienced deregulation and restructuring, the growth of competitive wholesale markets, the first waves of digital control and communications on the grid, and the early stirrings of renewable-energy integration and climate-policy concerns. The Review’s pages tracked all of this: issue after issue carried accessible summaries of the Society’s technical developments, summaries of papers appearing in the Society’s Transactions, news of standards activity, and invited overview articles that helped engineers in industry keep current with a rapidly changing field.

The Review was never conceived as an archival home for primary research. Instead, it occupied a distinct and deliberately chosen niche in the IEEE publication portfolio: less archival than a Transactions journal, but more technically substantive than a general membership newsletter. Its purpose was to translate and digest the results appearing in the Society’s specialized venues for an audience of practicing engineers who needed broad current awareness rather than deep technical exposition of any single paper. In that role it functioned much like a professional magazine of record for the power engineering community — the place where an engineer running a utility, designing protection schemes, or planning transmission expansion could learn what the research community had produced, what the standards committees were doing, and where the profession was heading.

This digest-and-summary model distinguished the Review from its better-known siblings. The IEEE Transactions on Power Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery were (and remain) the archival venues for primary research: full papers, rigorous peer review, and a scholarly audience. The Review, by contrast, published brief technical summaries, invited overview articles, and news items — material designed for fast consumption by busy practitioners. The two tiers were complementary: the Transactions advanced the science, and the Review spread the knowledge.

Editorial Scope and Format

The Review’s editorial scope covered the core topics of electrical power systems: generation, transmission, distribution, protective relaying, power electronics, and grid stability, along with the standards activity that underpins the industry. Typical contents of an issue included condensed summaries of papers from the Society’s Transactions, short feature overviews on emerging topics, news about Society and IEEE activities, and updates from standards working groups. The writing style was deliberately accessible: articles assumed an engineering background but did not require the reader to work through dense mathematics or lengthy derivations. The goal was informed awareness, not scholarly specialization.

This accessible-summary format made the Review an important continuing-education vehicle for power engineering practitioners. An engineer responsible for substation protection could not realistically read every paper in the Transactions on Power Delivery; the Review offered a filtered, readable digest of what mattered. In that sense, the publication supported the profession’s lifelong learning at a time when continuing-education infrastructure in industry was far less developed than it is today.

The Review also documented the standards-development work of the IEEE Power Engineering Society, which has long been one of the Society’s most consequential activities. Standards for equipment, protection, testing, and grid operation underpin the reliability of electric service worldwide, and the Review’s coverage of standards activity kept the practicing community informed about ballots, revisions, and new working groups.

Notable Content and Widely Cited Work

Although the Review was not a primary research journal, some of its papers entered the archival literature in their own right and accumulated substantial citation records. The most prominent example is “Network Reconfiguration in Distribution Systems for Loss Reduction and Load Balancing” by Mesut E. Baran and Felix F. Wu, published in 1989, which formulated the feeder reconfiguration problem for loss reduction and load balancing and presented a novel solution method based on searching over radial configurations created by branch exchanges. Bibliometric indexes credit this paper with several thousand citations — an exceptional figure for a magazine-style paper, and evidence of how broadly the Review’s readership reached into research practice.

The Review also published work that was taken up well beyond the power engineering community. The Global Energy Network Institute’s media-coverage collection, for example, cites a series of Review articles from the mid-1990s through 2002 on topics such as linking renewable energy resources through international high-voltage grids, remote renewable resources enabled by international electrical interconnections, and a 1998 panel-session paper on linking renewable resources as a global strategy for sustainable development. These articles show the Review engaging, well before it became fashionable, with the themes of renewable integration and global grid interconnection that now dominate the field.

In addition, the Review regularly featured historical articles on the development of the power industry — pieces on topics such as early measurements in lightning and high-voltage transmission — and the IEEE Power & Energy Society and the Engineering and Technology History Wiki have since partnered to make selected such historical articles freely available to the public on IEEE Xplore. These open articles provide a window into how earlier generations of engineers confronted challenges that remain familiar: long-distance transmission, load forecasting, and fault protection.

The Transition: From the Review to IEEE Power and Energy Magazine (2003)

The Review’s final year was 2002. Beginning in 2003, the publication continued under a new title: IEEE Power and Energy Magazine (ISSN 1540-7977), launched with the January/February 2003 issue. Library catalogs such as the German Electronic Journals Library record the title change explicitly: the Review ran from Volume 1, Issue 1 (1981) through Volume 22, Issue 12 (2002), and the new title began in 2003. Wikipedia’s entry on the magazine likewise lists IEEE Power Engineering Review (ISSN 0272-1724) as its former name and gives its history as 2003–present.

The relaunch was driven by the broadening of the field itself. As the scope of power engineering expanded to encompass renewable-energy integration, smart-grid systems, distributed generation, energy efficiency, and energy-policy questions — including business, environmental, and social concerns beyond the purely technical — the Society reorganized its publication offerings. The Review’s digest-and-summary model was incorporated into the broader charter of the new magazine, which adopted a similar accessible style while adding the policy and environmental dimensions that the older publication had not covered. The first editor of the magazine was Melvin I. Olken, who wrote the inaugural editorial in the January/February 2003 issue describing the new publication as being built on the firm foundation created by the Review and the Society’s earlier publications.

The name of the Society itself followed the same trajectory a few years later: the IEEE Power Engineering Society became the IEEE Power & Energy Society in 2007, a change its members approved after surveys and a review of industry trends showed increased focus on power-and-energy topics such as climate change, renewable energy sources, distributed generation, and energy efficiency — and found that the older name conjured an old-fashioned image. The Review-to-magazine transition of 2003 was, in hindsight, an early signal of that same evolution.

Legacy and Archival Significance

The historical record of the IEEE Power Engineering Review holds lasting value for several audiences. For researchers studying the development of electrical grid technologies, the Review’s twenty-two volumes provide a practitioner-level chronicle of how the field addressed long-distance transmission, load forecasting, fault protection, protective relaying, and power electronics across the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s — the formative decades of the modern grid. For historians of engineering, the Review documents the evolution of the power engineering profession’s institutions: the growth of standards activity, the changing business models of the utility industry, and the emergence of the energy-policy dimension that now defines the field.

The publication also exemplifies a now-scarcer genre: the professional digest periodical that sits between the scholarly journal and the trade newsletter. In an age when practitioners can skim preprints and blogs, it is easy to forget how vital such curated digests were when the primary research literature was growing beyond any individual’s ability to read it in full. The Review’s model — expert summaries, invited overviews, and news, all written for the working engineer — was carried forward by its successor magazine, but the twenty-two volumes of the Review itself remain the original record of the idea working at scale.

For the field’s professional memory, the Review preserves the concerns and conversations of two critical decades: the engineering response to blackout-driven reliability concerns, the adaptation to deregulated markets, the first serious treatment of renewable resources and intercontinental grid interconnection as engineering problems rather than speculation. Anyone writing the history of how the power system became the energy system will find the Review an indispensable primary source.

Accessing Back Issues and Citing the Review

Historical issues of the IEEE Power Engineering Review are preserved and accessible through IEEE Xplore, where the publication appears under publication number 39, covering Volume 1, Issue 1 (1981) through Volume 22, Issue 12 (2002). Access to the full text is generally subject to subscription or other authentication, as is standard for the IEEE Xplore digital library. In addition, the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s partnership with the Engineering and Technology History Wiki has made selected historical articles from the Review freely available to the public, with abstracts and links listed on the ETHW archives page for the publication.

Authors citing the Review should use the print ISSN 0272-1724 (or the electronic ISSN 1558-1705 for online versions) and note the correct title for the period cited. Work published from 2003 onward under the successor title should be cited as IEEE Power and Energy Magazine (ISSN 1540-7977), not under the Review’s title — the two titles are bibliographically distinct even though one continues the other’s mission.

Librarians and catalogers should note that the Review’s ISSN-L is 0272-1724, that the publication carried both print and electronic ISSNs, and that holdings records generally treat the 1981–2002 run as complete and closed. The successor magazine is a separate catalog record.

A Note for Authors and Submitters

Because the IEEE Power Engineering Review ceased publication more than two decades ago, it is not possible to submit manuscripts to it, join its editorial board, or subscribe to it as a current title. Any website, directory, or service that presents the Review as an active venue accepting papers is providing outdated information. Authors with work on electric power topics who would once have targeted the Review should instead consider its successor, IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, or the Society’s Transactions journals — the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, the IEEE Transactions on Energy Markets, Policy and Regulation, and the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid — depending on the nature and depth of the manuscript. This profile intentionally lists no submission link, no article processing charge, and no current editorial personnel for the Review, because none exist.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is IEEE Power Engineering Review still published?

No. The publication ceased at the end of 2002 with Volume 22, Issue 12. It is a historical, discontinued title. Its successor is IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, which has been published since 2003.

When was IEEE Power Engineering Review published?

From 1981 through 2002, in twenty-two volumes (Volume 1, Issue 1 to Volume 22, Issue 12), appearing monthly. This dating follows the IEEE Xplore global archive listing and the Electronic Journals Library record; the earlier end date is the well-documented fact, with the final issue dated December 2002.

What is the ISSN of IEEE Power Engineering Review?

The print ISSN is 0272-1724 (also the ISSN-L), and the electronic ISSN is 1558-1705.

Who published IEEE Power Engineering Review?

The IEEE Power Engineering Society — the IEEE society now known as the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES), renamed in 2007.

What succeeded IEEE Power Engineering Review?

IEEE Power and Energy Magazine (ISSN 1540-7977), launched in 2003, continues the Review’s mission in an expanded form that also covers energy policy, business, environmental, and social dimensions of electric power.

Was IEEE Power Engineering Review a research journal?

No, not in the archival sense. It was a digest and news periodical: it published brief technical summaries, invited overview articles, and news items for practicing engineers, rather than primary research papers. Its sister publications — the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery — were the Society’s archival research journals.

Did it have an impact factor or charge an APC?

As a discontinued magazine-style digest periodical that ceased in 2002, it has no current impact factor, no editorial board, and no article processing charge. Historical metric data sometimes appears in bibliographic databases for its active years, but no current metric exists or is meaningful.

Where can I read old issues?

Historical issues are preserved on IEEE Xplore (publication number 39), generally behind subscription access. Selected historical articles have been made freely available to the public through the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s partnership with the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.

How should I cite articles from it?

Cite the title IEEE Power Engineering Review with ISSN 0272-1724 (print) or 1558-1705 (electronic) for material published 1981–2002. Material from 2003 onward under the successor title is cited as IEEE Power and Energy Magazine (ISSN 1540-7977).

Why do some directories still list it as active?

Many automated journal directories ingest stale metadata and never record title changes or cessations. Because the Review’s ISSN remains valid as a bibliographic identifier, directory pages can look current even when the publication has been closed for over two decades. Always check the publisher’s own record — in this case, IEEE Xplore and the IEEE Power & Energy Society — for the authoritative status of a title.