What Papers Does the Journal of Transportation Engineering Want?

Reviewers and prospective authors frequently ask what is needed to have a paper published in the Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems (JTEA). Is a particular topic within scope? Is a particular paper sophisticated enough or a sufficient contribution to be published? While each paper is unique, this editorial is intended to give some guidance for these questions.

There are several categories of manuscripts that may be published in JTEA, and each has different types of potential contributions. The major categories include:

While the first four categories of publications are peer reviewed, the content will vary from category to category. However, each category is expected to contribute to the JTEA community. For example, a good state-of-the-art review paper would not be just a compilation of literature or practice in an area, but would provide useful organization and insights into the existing literature or engineering practice.

ASCE provides some general guidance for suitable papers in all their various journals (ASCE 2014):

“To be acceptable for publication, a manuscript must:

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Be of value and interest to civil engineers.

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Be an original review of past practice, present information, or probe new fields of civil engineering activity.

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Contribute to the planning, analysis, design, construction, management, or maintenance of civil engineering works.

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Contribute to the advancement of the profession by using the journals as a forum for the exchange of experiences by engineers.

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Include a practical applications section whenever possible; theoretical manuscripts should indicate areas of additional research to implement technology transfer.

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Be free of evident commercialism or private interest, but must not obscure proper names when they are required for an understanding of the subject matter.

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Be free of personalities, either complimentary or derogatory.

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Not be readily available elsewhere—it should not have been published previously by ASCE (including a proceeding) or other professional or technical societies, federal agencies, or commercial publishers.

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Be clear and transparent on authorship; ASCE will not review or publish any manuscripts whose authorship is in dispute.

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Be consistent with the purpose of the Society and not contain purely speculative matter, although it can use scientific evidence to challenge current concepts or propose new ideas that will encourage progress and discussion.”

Three items are worth emphasizing from these guidelines for JTEA. First, papers should be of value and interest to civil engineers working in the general field of transportation engineering. This audience of civil engineers is quite varied, including educators, practitioners, and researchers. Other peer-reviewed journals focus more narrowly on the research community alone. Thus, papers simply proposing a new model or method may be of limited value if they do not address the comparative advantage of the new approach over existing engineering practice. For example, papers that are based only on traffic simulation model output are problematic as a valuable contribution because they are typically not validated with empirical data for the full range of applications (Hendrickson and Rilett 2017). While simulation models can indicate potential desirable designs or management approaches, simulation approaches require testing in the physical world.

Some papers lack value because of special characteristics or difficulties in generalization and application elsewhere. For example, there are a variety of techniques for formalizing the valuations of particular decision makers among alternatives, but many such approaches are fairly standard and the particular valuations made are not generally transferable. Similarly, a particular case study may have unique properties of traffic or geometry that do not occur elsewhere. In particular, papers reanalyzing an existing data set with a slightly different approach would only be of value to the engineering community if new insights emerged.

Second, the contents of valuable papers need not have sophisticated models or any model at all. Analysis of new data, original reviews of practice, case studies of approaches that do not work, and assessment of new designs, management strategies, and technologies can all be useful engineering contributions. Indeed, many transportation engineering decision makers recognize that most models of any type contain a variety of uncertainties. Black box models that are difficult to analyze are particularly suspect in this regard. While models can be extremely useful, validation in the field is essential and the cost of more sophistication may not be warranted. The test of a contribution is its value to transportation engineers, not the sophistication of the modeling approach.

Third, the guideline with respect to work not being readily available elsewhere is becoming less strict over time. For example, US Department of Transportation funded research work is expected to be available via open access and in the National Transportation Library (NTL) (BTS 2019). As the ASCE copyright agreement states, “authors may post the final draft of their work on open, unrestricted Internet sites or deposit it in an institutional repository. When the draft contains a link to the published version at www.ascelibrary.org.‘Final draft’ means the version submitted to ASCE after peer review and prior to copyediting or other ASCE production activities; it does not include the copyedited version, the page proof, a PDF, or full-text HTML of the published version (ASCE 2019c)” Authors can arrange to have open access for their published work with ASCE and to use the published work freely for educational activities.

In addition to a useful contribution to the state of knowledge, desirable papers should also fit within the scope of JTEA and of the types of manuscripts described previously. The general guidelines for the journal’s scope are as follows: JTEA “contains technical and professional engineering articles on the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of air, highway, rail, and urban transportation systems and infrastructure. Specific topics include management of roads, bridges, and transit systems; traffic management technology and intelligent transportation systems; connected and automated vehicle impacts; highway engineering; railway engineering; and economics, safety, and environmental aspects of transportation” (ASCE 2019b).

Our scope of transportation engineering topics is very broad and provides considerable flexibility in accepting papers for review. Some papers may fit more naturally into our companion ASCE journals, particularly related journals that have started up after JTEA began. Examples are the Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part B: Pavements, Journal of Infrastructure Systems, Journal of Bridge Engineering, Journal of Pipeline Systems Engineering and Practice, and Journal of Urban Planning and Development. As editors, we often transfer papers to one of these companion journals if it is more appropriate.

Some submitted papers may be of marginal interest to civil engineers and are better suited to other journals such as operations research journals. A good indication of such lack of fit is the absence of relevant past papers published in JTEA among the list of references of a submitted paper. Such an absence also has the practical problem that authors of referenced papers are often excellent candidates for reviewers. Similarly, lack of a clear discussion of the paper’s contribution to engineering practice is a significant indication that the paper could be out of scope.

Authors can improve their likelihood of manuscript acceptance by insuring that the paper presentation is clear prior to submission to ASCE. Excellent graphics, clear and logical organization, understandable placement of the paper within the existing literature, and good English prose all aid the review process and attractiveness of a paper. Reviewers can often reject papers that are difficult to understand. Authors who are not confident of their English skills can seek editorial services to improve manuscript presentations (ASCE 2019a).

In closing, we thank authors and reviewers for supporting JTEA. For reviewers, we urge you to focus on any contribution that might be found in a submitted paper. In many cases, such value can be enhanced from reviewer comments and subsequent revisions. For authors, we invite you to submit your work for such peer review and eventual publication.