Report on the State of the SoSyM Journal end of 2022

SoSyM continued to expand in many ways over the past year. Modeling remains a challenging topic, in terms of both research investigations and practical applications. While a growing number of industrial projects are collecting important experiences about the application of models in various forms, they are also identifying new and challenging questions that need to be addressed and solved. This holds for models applied to traditional software development, models that assist in the design of cyber physical systems, andmodels that offer support for systems modeling, in general. A completely new chapter has been opened with the use of models not only for system development, but also for the investigation of their accompanying digital twins, as addressed in a recent editorial.

I'm very glad to have been invited by Bernhard, Jeff and Springer to become a new Editor-in-Chief for SoSyM. I'm thankful for their confidence, and eager to maintain, and even expand, the scientific value of the journal. SoSyM has been personally highly influential, not only being my main reading, but also the premier venue to publish my own main contributions. I'm engaged in maintaining SoSyM as a premier venue for systems and software modeling contributions, and to offer the community the high-quality journal it deserves. Finally, I can not introduce myself into SoSyM without mentioning the role of Prof. Robert B. France, co-founder of SoSyM, but above all a role model, a mentor and a friend. Robert passed away too early, but offered the community the foundations it needed to grow and be impactful: various fundamental and ground-breaking scientific contributions, a unified and friendly community, and... this journal! I am now very proud to continue along his path at SoSyM, and to perpetuate what he initiated. This has been influential to me in becoming a new Editor-in-Chief for SoSyM! Contact me at benoit.combemale@sosym.org and you can read more about me at http://combemale.fr Together with Benoit Combemale, a third Assistant Editor, Stéphanie Challita, also joins the team. Both Stéphanie and Benoit will build a strong team to handle incoming submissions in a timely manner together with the already existing team of Jeff and Huseyin, as well as Bernhard and Martin. As before, Martin and Bernhard will remain responsible for the Theme and Special Section organization and the Expert Voices. Together with our Associate Editorsin-Chiefs, namely Marsha Chechik, Martin Gogolla, and Jean-Marc Jezequel, and our Regional Ambassadors Tao Yue (China) and Vinay Vkulkarni (India), we will work hard for the software and systems modeling community to further the opportunities provided by SoSyM.
With the growing need for additional expertise, we are also very happy to welcome five new Editors to the SoSyM team. We look forward to working with Peter Clarke, Sudipto Ghosh, Holger Giese, Houari Sahraoui, and Barbara Weber in the future years! Without our authors and reviewers, SoSyM would not exist. We deeply thank all of the authors and reviewers (a complete list can be found below) for their work in 2022. We invite all authors to continue submitting their contributions to SoSyM and we are always available to correspond regarding questions about the suitability of an idea or potential submission.

A thank you to our retiring editors
We are grateful for the many years of service offered to SoSyM by Gordon Blair and Perdita Stevens. They retired from the Editorial Board over the past year.

2022 summary statistics
The six SoSyM issues published in 2022 contained 34 Regular papers, 19 Special Section papers, 32 Theme Section papers, 1 Overview paper, 6 Expert Voices, 9 Guest Editorials, and 1 Erratum. This represents a collection of 101 papers (2,553 pages) published in volume 21. This is a 16% increase in terms of pages compared to the previous year and continues to represent the commitment by our publisher (Springer) in reducing the time to publication by processing papers expeditiously after acceptance. We are grateful to Elizabeth Dziubela, our Springer liaison, for her helpful efforts in assisting us with the expansion.
We are happy to report that the two-year Impact Factor (IF) for SoSyM increased for the second year in a row to 2.211 (previously at 1.876 in 2020 and 1.910 in 2021) and is getting closer to the record (2.66) from 2019. The fiveyear IF increased to 2.423 (from 2.074 last year), which is the highest score in the history of SoSyM. Furthermore, the h-5 Google Scholar ranking places SoSyM at #14 among all conferences and journals related to software engineering and programming languages. Further rankings can be found at https://www.sosym.org/.
Over the past year, SoSyM received 374 submissions-a slight decrease when compared to the 420 in 2021, which was the largest number of submissions in SoSyM history. The number of downloads continued to increase over the last 5 years. At the end of 2022, there were 273,171 downloaded SoSyM articles during the calendar year (compared to 197.730 in 2021).
The acceptance rate in 2022 was atypically high at 37.6%, which suggests that we received many high quality papers last year. The average time from submission to the final decision (accept or reject) has slightly decreased to 162 days (170 days in 2021).

SoSyM's ten-year most influential paper awards
The modeling research community has matured in several aspects. It is interesting to take a look back into the 10year history of SoSyM to observe what contributions had the most impact and what topics emerged as most prominent over the decade. Our continuing collaboration with the MODELS conference series has also provided SoSyM an opportunity in 2022 to honor the authors of the most influential papers. We have again identified the two papers (from the Regular and Theme Section areas) that had the most impact over the past decade since their publication. The selection is based on the ISI citation index among papers published in SoSyM since 2012. The following two papers were presented at MODELS 2022 and each author received an award certificate. We congratulate the authors for these "Most Influential" papers of SoSyM over the past decade. The SoSyM 2022 "Ten-year most influential Regular paper award" was given to: Shaukat Ali, Lionel C. Briand, and Hadi Hemmati, "Modeling robustness behavior using aspectoriented modeling to support robustness testing of industrial systems", In: More information about the awards can be found at: https://www.sosym.org/awards/.

SoSyM's Journal-First Papers at MODELS 2022
The collaboration between SoSyM and the MODELS conference continued in 2022 with the organization of the SoSyM "Journal-First" option. This collaboration enables all authors of recent SoSyM papers (which were not affiliated with any past conference) to present their work across the core conference sessions at MODELS. Through this collaboration, SoSyM authors have the opportunity to reach a broader audience to present their work. At MODELS 2022, a new

Reviewers in 2022
A strong research community depends on the efforts of volunteers who help serve as reviewers. The software and systems modeling community has always risen to the request for help from SoSyM. We appreciate all of the assistance that the reviewers provided in service to the modeling community! We would also like to offer special recognition to the following reviewers, who were recommended as the SoSyM Best Reviewers of 2022, based on the technical depth and feedback provided to authors over the past year-congratulations! Each of the following reviewers received a certificate of recognition: Moharram Challenger, Antonio Cicchetti, Federico • "MemoRec: a recommender system for assisting modelers in specifying metamodels" by Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Claudio Di Sipio, Phuong Nguyen, and Alfonso Pierantonio • "Formal reconfiguration model for cloud resources" by Aida Lahouij, Lazhar Hamel, and Mohamed Graiet • "Evaluating the accessibility of a PoN-enabled misuse case notation by the red-green colorblind community" by Mohamed El-Attar • "Checking security compliance between models and code" by Katja Tuma, Sven Peldszus, Daniel Strüber, Riccardo Scandariato, and Jan Juerjens • "Generating repairs for inconsistent models" We wish you a Happy New Year with the hope that you enjoy reading the papers in this issue and all other forthcoming papers for 2023. We also invite you to look over previously published SoSyM papers, which include over 20 years or archived scientific contributions! Stéphanie Challita, Benoit Combemale, Huseyin Ergin, Jeff Gray, Bernhard Rumpe, and Martin Schindler.
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