JREF: Journal Rankings in Energy Forecasting (2015)

Publication is a very important activity for researchers. It is often tied to graduation, tenure, promotion, funding, and so forth. As far as I know, there is not yet a journal for energy forecasting.

As an author, I often asked myself,

Which journal shall I send my paper to?

As a reader, I had a similar question,

Which journals shall I read papers from?

Since I want my papers to show up with the other best papers, the interaction between the two questions above becomes

Where are the best energy forecasting papers?

This is also one of the most frequent question I have been asked from our community. When IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting was founded 5 years ago, the mission was to bridge the gap between the industry needs and academic research and education. This mission has been embedded in all the tasks we have performed, including the renowned Global Energy Forecasting Competition. Now it's time to find out the venues that host the best energy forecasting papers.

To figure out a credible answer, I again took a crowd-sourcing approach. I surveyed 20 research groups that are currently active in energy forecasting, asking them to nominate and rank the journals based on the energy forecasting papers published since 2011. 14 of them responded to my survey in time. From the survey responses, I can summarize the grade and score for energy forecasting in general as well as the three subject areas, including demand forecasting, price forecasting and generation forecasting.

Here comes the A+ journals from the 2015 Journal Rankings in Energy Forecasting with their A+ ranked subject areas:

• International Journal of Forecasting (energy; demand; price)
• IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid (energy; demand; generation)
• IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (energy; price)
• IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy (energy)
• Solar Energy (generation)
• Wind Energy (generation)

The complete list of all the journals nominated during this survey is available HERE.

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the valuable input and comments from the following scholars (including myself):

• Bello Morales, Antonio | Comillas Pontifical University, Spain
• Dowell, Jethro | University of Strathclyde, UK
• Fan, Shu | Monash University, Australia
• Haben, Stephen | University of Oxford, UK
• Hong, Tao | University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
• Jeon, Jooyoung | University of Bath, UK
• Kang, Chongqing | Tsinghua University, China
• Lee, Duehee | KPMG, USA
• Lee, Wei-Jen | University of Texas at Arlington, USA
• Monteiro, Cláudio | University of Porto, Portugal
• Pinson, Pierre | Denmark University of Technology, Denmark
• Povinelli, Richard | Marquette University, USA
• Wang, Jianxue | Xi'an Jiaotong University, China
• Weron, Rafal | Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland
• Zareipour, Hamidreza | University of Calgary, Canada

I would also like to continue this effort going forward. If you would like to have your opinion counted in the next survey, please sign up HERE by putting JREF in the comment field. You will need at least one forecasting paper published in one of the A+ journals over the past three years to be eligible to vote.