IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine

About IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine — Journal Profile

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (often shortened to RAM) is the flagship magazine of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. It occupies a deliberate middle position in the robotics literature. The society itself describes the magazine as a unique technology publication that is peer-reviewed, readable and substantive, and as a forum for articles that fall between the academic and theoretical orientation of scholarly journals and vendor-sponsored trade publications. That positioning is the single most important fact for any author or reader approaching the title: this is a rigorously reviewed research venue that is nevertheless written, edited and read as a magazine for practising engineers as much as for laboratory researchers.

The magazine has been published since 1994 and appears quarterly, in March, June, September and December. Its print ISSN is 1070-9932 and its electronic ISSN is 1558-223X. The publisher of record is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and OpenAlex records the United States as the country of publication, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers as host organisation, and 1994 as the first publication year. The stored Journals World record for this post lists the same two ISSNs, in unhyphenated form as 10709932 and 1558223X, and the same publisher, so the core identity in the catalogue agrees with the official and OpenAlex records.

Quick Facts

• Full title: IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine
• Abbreviation used by the community: RAM
• Print ISSN: 1070-9932
• Electronic ISSN: 1558-223X
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, through the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society
• Country: United States, as recorded by OpenAlex
• Frequency: Quarterly — March, June, September and December
• Publishing since: 1994
• Review model: Peer review overseen by associate editors; double-anonymous review enforced for new submissions after 1 July 2025, according to the society
• Open access status: Not a fully open access journal; OpenAlex records is_oa as false and a DOAJ search for ISSN 1070-9932 returns no listing

History and Place Within the IEEE Robotics Publications

To understand RAM, it helps to place it beside its sister publications. The IEEE Transactions on Robotics and the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering publish advances in theory and experiment that underpin the science of robotics and automation. RAM complements those transactions rather than competing with them. Where a transactions paper is expected to prove a result with full mathematical and experimental rigour for specialists, a magazine article is expected to present new scientific results to the practising engineer, with a focus on working systems, creative solutions to real-world problems, and implementation details that a specialist proof often leaves out.

That distinction has shaped the magazine for three decades. Robotics moved, during the lifetime of this title, from industrial arms on factory floors to a field that includes autonomous vehicles, surgical and rehabilitation robots, agricultural and field robots, underwater and space systems, disaster-response machines, wearable devices, and robots that share homes, hospitals and warehouses with people. A transactions literature can register each technical advance in isolation. A magazine can do something different: it can show a complete system working in its intended setting, explain why particular design choices were made, report what failed as well as what succeeded, and place the work in the context of standards, education, industry practice and public policy. The society states that the magazine also treats the social, economic and policy dimensions of robotics as part of a complete understanding of the field, and its columns and feature writing reflect that wider brief.

The readership described by the magazine itself reinforces this picture. RAM has described its audience as the people who drive robotics technology, with more than half working in basic research and many others being senior engineers and decision-makers in industry. Authors should therefore imagine a reader who is technically expert, who may work in a neighbouring subfield rather than in the author's own niche, and who wants to understand what a system does, why it matters, and how it was made to work — without first fighting through notation that only a handful of specialists use.

Scope in Detail

The official scope is intentionally broad across robotics and automation. Regular technical articles cover the full spectrum of the field, from theoretical contributions to applied systems work. In practice, and consistently with the topic profile that OpenAlex derives from the magazine's published output, the strongest clusters include robotics and automated systems, robot manipulation and learning, robotic mechanisms and dynamics, soft robotics, social robotics and human–robot interaction, localisation and sensor-based navigation, robotic locomotion and control, prosthetics and rehabilitation robotics, teleoperation and haptic systems, path planning, reinforcement learning in robotics, underwater vehicles, and flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems.

Several consequences follow from that breadth. First, a paper does not need to announce a new theorem to belong here; a well-documented working system, a careful experimental study in a real environment, or a design that solves a stubborn practical problem in a transferable way can be squarely in scope. Second, breadth is not a licence for vagueness: because readers come from many subfields, an author must explain the problem setting, the constraints of the real environment, and the reason the chosen approach fits those constraints. Third, topics at the boundary of robotics — education, ethics, safety, standards, and the organisation of research itself — have a genuine home in the magazine's columns and features, even though they would sit awkwardly in a transactions title.

The magazine publishes several distinct kinds of material, and confusing them is a common reason for a poor submission decision. Regular technical articles undergo a peer review process overseen by the magazine's associate editors. Special issues on important and emerging topics are fully reviewed as well, but are managed by guest editors; authors should read a special-issue call carefully, because its theme, timetable and guest-editor expectations define fit more narrowly than the general scope. Tutorial articles, written by leading experts, are a significant part of the portfolio and give the magazine its role as an orientation resource for engineers moving into a new area. Regular columns cover education, industry news, society news, technical and regional activity, and a calendar of events. Feature articles, news, commentary, opinion pieces and position papers sit alongside the peer-reviewed research content and are handled differently from research articles, as the society's information for authors explains.

What the Editors Ask of Research Articles

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's information for authors is unusually explicit about style, and prospective authors should treat it as part of the journal's identity rather than as cosmetic advice. Research articles should be written in a manner accessible to the general RAM audience, emphasising conceptual understanding over technical minutiae, and presenting content in a clear and engaging style that is distinct from a typical research article in a traditional research journal. Authors are given some flexibility in structure and presentation, provided the core ideas and main results are described clearly and intuitively, technical jargon is minimised, and excessive technical detail is moved to an appendix or supplementary materials where it is needed at all.

This has practical implications at every stage of writing. The introduction must establish a real-world problem before it establishes a literature gap. Figures should show the actual system, its environment and its behaviour, not only block diagrams and curves. Experimental sections should report the conditions under which a system was tested, the failures and limitations encountered, and the engineering decisions that followed. A result that is novel and of high research significance and impact, in the society's own phrasing, still needs to be made legible to a robotics engineer working in a different application area. Authors whose natural draft is a dense transactions-style manuscript should expect to rewrite, not merely to reformat, before submitting here.

On review, the society notes that RAM moved to double-anonymous review, with a grace period until 30 June 2025 for submissions that were single-anonymous, and double-anonymous review enforced for new submissions after 1 July 2025. Authors should therefore prepare an anonymised manuscript in line with the current instructions on the society and magazine sites, and should check those instructions again at the moment of submission, because review arrangements and special-issue deadlines change more often than the underlying scope does.

Indexing, Metrics and How to Read Them

RAM is a long-established IEEE title indexed in the major engineering literature. Authors should verify the current indexing list on the official magazine or IEEE Xplore pages before relying on any single database claim, because database coverage lists are updated independently of the journal. What can be stated from sources consulted directly for this profile is the bibliometric picture in OpenAlex and the figures that secondary services report from SCImago and Scopus data.

OpenAlex, fetched directly by ISSN for this profile, records the source as S132261465, with 3,057 works, 1,035 open access works, and 92,610 citations, a summary h-index of 128, an i10-index of 917, and a two-year mean citedness of about 2.14. Those are OpenAlex's own counts, built from its open citation graph, and they will not match Scopus or Web of Science counts for the same title, because each database indexes a different set of documents and citations. Secondary services reporting SCImago data have put the SCImago h-index lower, at around 109, with an SJR value around 1.0 in one recent aggregation, while other aggregators quoting Scopus CiteScore data have reported CiteScore values in the region of 8 to 9 and the best quartile as Q1 in categories such as Computer Science Applications, Control and Systems Engineering, and Electrical and Electronic Engineering. The exact SJR and CiteScore move from year to year and differ between reporting services because they republish different annual snapshots; readers who need a figure for a tenure, promotion or funding file should take it from SCImago, Scopus or Journal Citation Reports directly for the year in question, and name that source and year alongside the number.

Two warnings belong with any metric discussion for this title. First, a magazine that publishes tutorials, features and columns alongside research articles will accumulate citations in a different pattern from a pure research journal: a good tutorial can be cited for a decade as an entry point to a topic, while news and column material is rarely cited at all, so averages conceal more here than usual. Second, the h-index values quoted by different services for this same journal — 115 in the older stored record of its duplicate Journals World post, 128 in the current OpenAlex record, and around 109 in SCImago-based reporting — are not evidence that one service is simply wrong. They are evidence that h-index is a property of a database and a date, not of a journal alone. Any profile or evaluation that quotes an h-index without its source is incomplete.

On access and charges, OpenAlex lists an APC price of 2,045 US dollars for this source and records the journal as not fully open access. That listing should be read as OpenAlex's record of an optional or hybrid charge, not as a statement that every article in RAM costs that amount, and not as a substitute for the current IEEE author guidance on open access options and page charges. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals for ISSN 1070-9932 returned no listing, which is consistent with a subscription-based society magazine that offers open access routes for individual articles rather than operating as a fully open access journal. The magazine can be subscribed to in paper or electronic form, and society members encounter it through their IEEE and Robotics and Automation Society membership arrangements.

Who Should Submit, and Who Should Read

The strongest submissions to RAM share a pattern: a real system, a real problem, and a clear account of implementation. Research groups that have moved a robot out of simulation and into a warehouse, a field, an operating theatre, a classroom or a disaster exercise will usually find the magazine a more natural home than a theory-first venue, provided they are willing to write the work up accessibly. The same applies to groups reporting a mature platform, a long-running deployment, a replicable experimental method, or a comparative study whose value lies in hard-won practical detail. Tutorial authors with genuine authority in an emerging area — a new class of actuators, a new sensing modality, a new learning method that is beginning to work on physical machines — serve one of the magazine's core functions.

Conversely, a manuscript whose contribution is an incremental theoretical improvement, expressed for specialists and evaluated only in simulation against a narrow set of prior methods, is likely to be directed, in substance if not in name, towards the transactions literature. A manuscript that is essentially a product announcement, with no reviewable technical content and no honest discussion of limitations, belongs in trade publishing, which is precisely the side of the line the magazine defines itself against. Authors in doubt should ask a simple question: would a competent robotics engineer in a different subfield finish this article knowing how to build, evaluate or avoid something? If the answer is yes, the magazine format is working. If the answer is that only five specialists could follow it, the work probably needs a different venue or a substantial rewrite.

Readers use RAM differently from a transactions title as well. It is a journal to browse whole issues of, not only to search. Special issues map the state of an emerging topic through several reviewed contributions at once; tutorials provide a supervised entry into an unfamiliar area; columns keep readers in touch with education practice, industry movement, standards activity and the society's own regional and technical life. For a researcher entering robotics from computer science, mechanical engineering, medicine or agriculture, a run of recent issues is one of the fastest ways to learn what the community currently counts as a solved problem, a live problem, and a problem that looks solved only in simulation.

Practical Checklist Before Submitting

• Confirm that the work is presented as a working system, a real-world study, a tutorial or a clearly framed position — not as an unconverted transactions manuscript.
• Write the introduction for the general robotics audience; define specialised terms and move heavy derivation to an appendix or supplement.
• Prepare the manuscript in double-anonymous form in line with the current society instructions, and re-check those instructions at submission time.
• If responding to a special-issue call, follow the guest editors' theme and timetable exactly, and say in the cover material how the article fits that theme.
• Include honest implementation detail: test conditions, failure modes, limitations, and the design decisions that a practitioner would need in order to judge or reproduce the result.
• Check the current IEEE guidance on open access options, page charges, copyright and supplementary material rather than relying on any third-party listing of charges.
• Verify indexing and metric claims for evaluation files against SCImago, Scopus or Journal Citation Reports for the relevant year, naming the source used.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine a peer-reviewed journal or a trade magazine? It is a peer-reviewed magazine. Its regular technical articles and special-issue articles are fully reviewed, overseen for regular articles by associate editors, while it also carries features, news and columns that are handled editorially. Its own description places it between scholarly journals and trade publications in style, not in rigour.

How often does it appear? Quarterly, in March, June, September and December, as a publication of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 1070-9932 and electronic ISSN 1558-223X, confirmed in the stored record and in the OpenAlex source record for the title.

Is it open access? It is not a fully open access journal. OpenAlex records it as not open access as a source, a DOAJ search returns no listing, and open access for individual articles is governed by current IEEE options, which authors should check directly.

What citation figures can be quoted safely? Figures quoted with their source: OpenAlex records 3,057 works, 92,610 citations and an h-index of 128 for this source. SCImago-based services report different values from Scopus data. Always name the database and the year when the figure matters.

Where should a purely theoretical robotics paper go instead? The society's own framing points theory-and-experiment advances that underpin the science towards the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, with RAM complementing them through working systems and practice-facing presentation.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's official pages for the magazine, including its scope statement and information for authors; on the magazine's own description of its readership and format; on the OpenAlex source record fetched directly by ISSN (source S132261465); on a DOAJ search by ISSN, which returned no listing; and on secondary services reporting SCImago and Scopus figures, which are attributed as such in the text wherever they are used. Bibliometric values change as databases update, and repeated OpenAlex readings for robotics sources can diverge, so the OpenAlex figures above are the direct ISSN fetch made for this profile. No figure that could not be traced to one of those sources has been invented, and charges, review arrangements and deadlines should always be re-checked on the official society pages before submission.