New development and scope for Systematic & Applied Acarology

Systematic & Applied Acarology (SAA) started as an annual print publication in 1996 and this continued for a decade (Zhang 2005). The increase of frequency to biannual in 2006 and then to triannual from 2007 allowed more papers published in a timely manner (Zhang 2008). During 2007 and 2011, SAA was published three times per year and the number of papers per year averaged 35, or 26 % more than that of the first 11 years (Fig. 1). In 2011, SAA was selected for coverage in Science Citation Index Expanded (Zhang 2011). This made SAA more attractive as an outlet to a broader range of authors and the number of papers/pages per year started to increase rapidly (Fig. 1). SAA was published quarterly during 2012–2014 and the number of papers averaged 50 per year during this period. FIGURE 1. Numbers of papers and pages per year in Systematic & Applied Acarology. Data of 1996–2007 from summary in Zhang (2008). Zhang (2014b) predicted the first impact factor for SAA (2013) to be more than 1.1, which is very close to 1.115 published in Journal of Citation Reports (JCR Science edition, July 2014). JCR ranks SAA 37th of 90 journals in entomology; this JCR ranking of SAA is similar to Zhang (2014a)’s ranking of SAA as the 3rd of 9 research journals in acarology. As a result of the relatively good rankin