Recently, Professor Zhang Shiqing from the School of Electronics and Information Engineering at our university received a notification from Professor Salvador García-Lopez, the editor-in-chief of the top-tier journal Information Fusion (a Chinese Academy of Sciences SCI Q1 TOP journal, IF=14.7), inviting him to serve as an area editor for the journal. He will be responsible for handling manuscripts related to affective computing. Information Fusion is an internationally renowned authoritative journal in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence, ranking 4th out of 394 international journals in the discipline of “Computer Science: Information Systems” with a latest impact factor of 14.7 for 2024.

It is reported that Professor Zhang Shiqing has been engaged in research on artificial intelligence fields such as machine learning, pattern recognition, and affective computing, achieving a series of innovative results that have attracted attention from domestic and international counterparts. He has published more than 70 papers in important journals and conferences such as IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Expert Systems with Applications, and Information Fusion, including two ESI highly cited papers. He has chaired two National Natural Science Foundation of China projects in the field of affective computing, one major project of the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation, and four other provincial and ministerial-level projects. He has been selected for the list of the top 2% of scientists worldwide for five consecutive years.

In 2023, Prof. Zhang was invited to serve as an associate editor of the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (CAS SCI Q2, IF=9.6), a well-known journal in the field of affective computing, responsible for handling manuscripts in related areas.

According to statistics from the editorial boards of Information Fusion and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Professor Zhang Shiqing is currently the only representative from a local university in China, with the other domestic editors coming from well-known 985/211 universities. His appointment as an editor reflects his academic status and influence both domestically and internationally.

SCI journal editors are often referred to as the “gatekeepers” of international academic journals playing a significant role in the international scientific output evaluation system. On one hand, they act as key controllers of academic discourse, deciding on the publication of journal articles; on the other hand, they are usually academic elites in their fields. Therefore, these editorial figures may directly or indirectly influence the level of disciplinary construction at a university (Wang Xing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2016).