Proceedings of the IEEE

About Proceedings of the IEEE

Proceedings of the IEEE: Journal Profile

The Proceedings of the IEEE is the flagship journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — and it is a flagship of a particular kind. It does not compete with the IEEE's hundreds of Transactions and Letters titles for primary research papers. It publishes a small number of long, commissioned reviews, surveys and tutorials of broad significance, most of them inside carefully curated special issues led by distinguished guest editors, and it aims each one at the whole engineering profession: specialists deepening their command of a field, and non-specialists who need to come up to speed on a technology outside their own. Its own site calls it one of the most influential reference resources for engineers and computer scientists worldwide, and by citation measures that is not a boast, as the metrics section below shows.

The verified identity: print ISSN 0018-9219, electronic ISSN 1558-2256, published monthly by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in the United States, abbreviated Proc. IEEE, with the journal's lineage reaching back to 1913. One date in its records needs immediate explanation, because it confuses more readers than any other fact about this journal: databases such as Scopus and OpenAlex show its coverage beginning in 1963. That is not its founding. It is the year the title Proceedings of the IEEE replaced its predecessor title, Proceedings of the IRE. A profile that reports “founded 1963” has read a coverage field as a birth date.

At a Glance

• Full title: Proceedings of the IEEE
• Standard abbreviation: Proc. IEEE
• Print ISSN: 0018-9219
• Electronic ISSN: 1558-2256
• Lineage: Leading journal since 1913 (publisher's own statement); earlier history traced to 1909 in editorial histories
• Former title: Proceedings of the IRE (title changed to Proceedings of the IEEE in 1963)
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), United States
• Frequency: Monthly
• Impact Factor on the journal's official site: 30.9
• Article Influence Score on the journal's official site: 7.918
• CiteScore on the journal's official site: 60.3
• Content model: Reviews, surveys and tutorials; around ten special issues and two regular issues per year
• Access model: Subscription journal with open access options under IEEE's author programmes; no DOAJ listing as a fully open access title

History: From the IRE to the IEEE Flagship

The journal's publisher describes it as a leading journal since 1913, and editorial histories trace its ancestry further, to the Proceedings of the Wireless Institute in 1909 — a reminder that this journal is older than the profession's institutions in their modern form. Its long middle life was lived under another name: as the Proceedings of the IRE, the journal of the Institute of Radio Engineers, it chronicled the century of radio, radar, television, transistors and early computing. When the IRE and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers combined in 1963 to form the IEEE, the journal took its present name — which is why 1963 appears as the start year in Scopus coverage records and in the OpenAlex source record, and why those same records also list its subject history from that year forward. The renaming was institutional, not intellectual: the journal, its readership and its review mission continued across it.

That mission sharpened, over the twentieth century, into the modern formula. A research field served by dozens of specialised Transactions titles did not need its flagship to publish more primary papers; it needed a place where a technology could be explained whole, by the people who built it, to engineers who would use it from outside the specialty. The Proceedings became that place — the IEEE's journal of record for the state of the art, read precisely because its papers are few, long, refereed and written to be understood beyond their home discipline.

Its modern editorship illustrates the journal's international standing. Gianluca Setti, a professor of electronics and signal processing then at the University of Ferrara and later at the Politecnico di Torino and KAUST, served as editor-in-chief from 2019 to 2024 — the first non-United-States editor-in-chief in the journal's history, as his institutional biographies and his university's appointment announcement record, including for his second term. This profile names his tenure as documented history rather than guessing at the current holder: editorial leadership of this journal rotates, the publisher's own pages are the authoritative source for the sitting editor-in-chief, and a name copied from an older profile is exactly the kind of stale detail readers should re-check on the journal's site before relying on it. The journal states that its editorial board oversees its mission; institutional accounts of the Setti era note that the board was composed of IEEE Fellows, which reflects the seniority at which this journal recruits its editors.

Scope and Content Model

The journal's official at-a-glance description, published on proceedingsoftheieee.ieee.org, lists the model's elements in order: covers all topics in electrical engineering and computer science; publishes surveys, reviews and tutorials of broad significance; takes an applications-oriented focus; and organises much of its content as special issues and sections led by distinguished guest editors. The journal's longer published description, carried in reference listings, fills in the operating numbers: it publishes approximately ten special issues and two regular paper issues per year. Special issues are led by distinguished guest editor teams and contain articles — typically surveys, reviews or tutorials — from leading experts in the technology area covered; they serve as a guide to the state of the art and are valued both by the core research community and by specialists in other areas looking to come up to speed quickly. Regular issues consist of three to four papers on more focused topics, giving readers background and insight into emerging areas.

The description also defines the journal's three genres with unusual precision, and any prospective contributor should internalise the distinctions. Reviews critically examine a technology, tracing its progress from its inception to the present — and perhaps into the future. Surveys comprehensively view a technology: its applications, its issues, its ramifications and its potential. Tutorial papers explain a technology and may give practical information for implementing it; they are written for the purpose of informing non-specialist engineers about a particular technology. One journal, three different contracts with the reader — historical-critical, comprehensive-mapping, and practical-explanatory — and a manuscript that confuses them, surveying where it should teach or reviewing where it should explain implementation, is mis-shaped for the venue however strong its material.

Standing features

Alongside its review content, the journal carries features that express its memory and its breadth. Scanning Our Past explores the history of technology and the people associated with it — the journal treating its own century of archives as a living resource. Point of View explores topics of personal interest and of interest to members of the IEEE community: argued, signed perspectives rather than refereed surveys. Industry View, launched in 2022 in collaboration with IEEE Spectrum, highlights industry developments of technologies tied thematically to a special issue or section, with articles appearing in both publications — a deliberate bridge between the archival journal and the profession's magazine, and between research and industrial practice. A subscriber quoted on the journal's own site describes it in terms that capture the whole formula: “The Proceedings is my window on the world. I love the special issues providing broad and in-depth coverage.”

Breadth of Coverage

“All topics in electrical engineering and computer science” is a claim the special-issue model makes practical. Because each issue is guest-edited around a theme, the journal can commission the state of the art in areas as different as phased array technologies — a special issue whose editors note that the field draws on radio-frequency and microwave engineering, mixed-signal integrated circuit design and fabrication, high-speed networking, semiconductor device physics and materials, power distribution, computer science and thermal management — and machine learning, communications, power systems, biomedical engineering or quantum technologies, without diluting an editorial office in any one of them. The breadth is curated rather than accumulated: it exists because guest editor teams bring their own networks, standards of judgement and maps of their fields, under the oversight of the journal's editorial board. For the reader, the consequence is that a Proceedings special issue is often the fastest defensible route into an unfamiliar technology: one issue, written by its leading practitioners, refereed to the flagship's standard, and framed by the features around it.

Editorial Model: Commissioned, Guest-Edited, Refereed

The journal's site directs prospective contributors not to a conventional manuscript upload, but to a page headed “Become a guest editor or author” — the correct signal about how content originates here. Special issues are proposed and led by guest editor teams, who define the technology area, recruit its leading experts, and shape the issue under the editorial board's oversight; regular-issue papers come through the journal's own channels, with submission handled through IEEE's manuscript system. The unit of authorship is therefore often the invitation extended to a recognised authority, and the unit of editorial work is the issue as much as the paper.

Invitation does not dilute refereeing. Papers are written to be load-bearing references, and they are reviewed accordingly: referees for a survey or tutorial test completeness against the field's literature, technical accuracy at a level a specialist would accept, and — the genre-specific test — intelligibility and usefulness to the non-specialist engineer the journal explicitly writes for. Authors from deep within a specialty frequently find that last requirement the hardest: notation, assumptions and folk knowledge that pass unnoticed inside a Transactions paper must be explained, motivated or removed here. The practical guidance below follows from that reality.

Metrics and Standing — with Sources Named

The figures the journal leads with on its own official site are: an Impact Factor of 30.9, an Article Influence Score of 7.918, and a CiteScore of 60.3. Each is exceptional in context. An impact factor above thirty places the journal among the most cited periodicals in all of engineering; a CiteScore above sixty reflects the same phenomenon in Scopus's four-year window; and an Article Influence Score near eight means the average article's influence in the five years after publication is roughly eight times the world average for the citation network as that metric normalises it. SCImago-derived listings report a SCImago Journal Rank of 5.561 for 2025 and a Scopus-based h-index of 352, with first-quartile (Q1) standing in both Computer Science (miscellaneous) and Electrical and Electronic Engineering — the two broad categories in which the journal is classified.

OpenAlex, read directly for this profile, contributes the open-data reading. Its source record matched on ISSN 0018-9219 (source S68686220) records 20,157 works, 1,297,526 citations, an OpenAlex h-index of 472 and an i10-index of 7,817, with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers as host organisation, country US, and a first publication year of 1963 — the title-change year discussed above, which is itself evidence that the record describes this journal under its current title rather than its whole lineage. As with every journal in this profile series, the OpenAlex h-index runs higher than the Scopus figure because the underlying corpus is broader; both are reported with their sources, and neither should be quoted without them.

Why does a journal publishing a few dozen papers a year reach citation numbers of this order? The arithmetic is structural. Review, survey and tutorial papers are the citation currency of engineering: a researcher implementing a technology cites the survey that taught it, a lecturer assigns the tutorial, and every subsequent paper in the area cites the state-of-the-art review as its framing reference. A special issue that defines a field's map is cited by that field for a decade. And because the Proceedings publishes so few papers, its per-paper averages are not diluted by the long tail of lightly cited primary articles that pulls down the averages of high-volume journals. The same structure means the averages conceal wide variation between individual papers; a tutorial in a fashionable area may be cited thousands of times while a fine historical or niche paper is cited modestly, and authors should read the headline metrics as a statement about the venue's reach, not a promise about any single article.

Access, Subscriptions and Charges

The Proceedings is a subscription journal at the centre of the IEEE's publishing economy. Its site sells annual subscriptions and single copies directly, and for most academic readers the practical route is institutional access through the IEEE Xplore digital library, where the journal's archive is held and searched alongside the rest of IEEE's output. Authors who need or wish to make individual articles openly available should use IEEE's author resources to establish the current open access arrangements, licence options and any applicable charge at the time of acceptance: no fee figure is quoted in this profile, because the only charge value in the older JournalsWorld template record for this title could not be verified against the publisher's current author pages during this research, and an unverified fee quoted with false precision would be worse than none. The journal has no listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is expected for a subscription flagship and says nothing about the quality or reach of the title: DOAJ indexes fully open access journals, and the Proceedings is not one.

Indexing and the Archive

The journal is indexed in Scopus and in the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded, the two systems from which its CiteScore, SJR and impact factor derive, and its full archive is delivered through IEEE Xplore with DOIs assigned across its modern content. For a journal whose value is explicitly archival — whose own features mine its back catalogue and whose surveys remain references for decades — the depth and stability of that archive is part of the product: the record in OpenAlex under the current title alone, from 1963 forward, exceeds twenty thousand works and 1.29 million citations, and the pre-1963 lineage under the IRE title extends the citable history further back still.

Who Should Contribute — and Who Should Read

Contribute, or propose to, if you lead a research area and can assemble the guest editor team and author roster for a special issue that maps it; if you have been invited to write the review, survey or tutorial through which your field will be understood by the wider profession; or if you can explain your technology — with implementation-level practicality — to an expert engineer who works on something else. Publish your primary results elsewhere first: new experimental findings, novel algorithms with evaluation results, and incremental advances belong in the IEEE Transactions, journals, letters and conferences of the relevant society, and a Proceedings paper is normally written after a body of such primary work exists to be surveyed. Sending a primary research manuscript here misreads the journal's genre as thoroughly as sending a survey to a letters journal would.

Read it if you are an engineer or computer scientist moving into a new area and need its authoritative map in one issue; a specialist keeping command of your own field's consensus account of itself; a graduate student choosing a research direction, for whom its special issues are a curated shortlist of what matters; or an educator building a course, for whom its tutorials were literally designed.

Practical Guidance for Prospective Contributors

1. Start from the special-issue route. Study the journal's published and forthcoming special issues, identify the technology area whose state of the art has not yet been mapped or has changed beyond its last map, and shape a proposal — theme, guest editor team, proposed authors and papers — rather than a lone manuscript.
2. Choose your genre and honour it. Decide whether the paper is a review (critical, historical), a survey (comprehensive, mapping) or a tutorial (explanatory, implementation-aware), using the journal's own definitions, and write to that contract from the first outline.
3. Write for the non-specialist engineer from page one. Define notation, stage the background, and motivate every abstraction; the journal's refereeing will test this explicitly, and it is the commonest reason strong specialist material needs restructuring here.
4. Treat completeness as a refereeing criterion. A survey that omits a major research group's approach will be caught; build the literature coverage systematically, cite primary sources, and represent competing approaches fairly, especially where your own work is among them.
5. Plan figures as teaching instruments. In this journal, the taxonomy diagram, the comparison table and the worked architecture figure are often the most reused and most cited elements of a paper; budget real design effort for them.
6. Confirm current editorial and access details on the publisher's pages. The sitting editor-in-chief, open access options and any charges are stated on IEEE's own author and journal pages; rely on those, not on any dated secondary profile.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Proceedings of the IEEE a conference proceedings?

No — despite its name, it is a monthly peer-reviewed journal, the IEEE's flagship periodical. The name is historical, inherited from the proceedings tradition of its predecessor institutes. Conference proceedings are a separate part of IEEE publishing.

When was it founded — 1913 or 1963?

Both dates are real and they mark different events. The journal's lineage as a leading journal reaches back to 1913 in the publisher's own account (with editorial histories tracing it to 1909). In 1963 it took its present title, replacing Proceedings of the IRE, and database coverage under the current title begins then.

What are its ISSN numbers?

Print ISSN 0018-9219 and electronic ISSN 1558-2256.

What is its impact factor?

The journal's official site reports an Impact Factor of 30.9, an Article Influence Score of 7.918 and a CiteScore of 60.3. These are the publisher's current presentations at the time this profile was researched; metrics are revised on annual cycles.

Does it publish original research papers?

Its content is reviews, surveys and tutorials, organised largely in guest-edited special issues (about ten a year) with about two regular issues. Original research belongs primarily in the IEEE's Transactions and other specialist titles.

Is it open access?

It is a subscription journal, accessed mainly through institutional subscriptions and IEEE Xplore, with open access options for individual articles under IEEE's author programmes. It has no DOAJ listing as a fully open access journal.

Sources and Basis of This Profile

Primary sources are the journal's own site at proceedingsoftheieee.ieee.org: its journal page (leading journal since 1913; all topics in electrical engineering and computer science; surveys, reviews and tutorials of broad significance; applications-oriented focus; guest-edited special issues; Impact Factor 30.9; Article Influence Score 7.918; the Scanning Our Past, Point of View and Industry View features; and its invitation to become a guest editor or author) and its home page (CiteScore 60.3 alongside the same impact figures). The fuller content-model description — ten special issues and two regular issues a year, the definitions of reviews, surveys and tutorials, and the composition of regular issues — is the journal's published description as carried in reference listings of the title. Historical detail on the 1963 title change from Proceedings of the IRE and the IRE–AIEE combination is from the journal's encyclopaedic record. Gianluca Setti's tenure as editor-in-chief (2019–2024, first non-United-States holder) is from IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and Politecnico di Torino institutional records. Metrics cross-checks: SCImago-derived listings (SJR 5.561 for 2025, h-index 352, Q1 in Computer Science (miscellaneous) and Electrical and Electronic Engineering) and a direct OpenAlex source record matched by ISSN (S68686220: 20,157 works, 1,297,526 citations, h-index 472, first year 1963 under the current title). A DOAJ search by ISSN returned no record, consistent with the subscription model.