Editorial

摘要

The Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology (TUST) journal in the last decade has gone through some notable changes, these changes reflecting both the research community and the publication industry. To begin with, although it may not be obvious to readers, there has been a steady increase in manuscript submissions to TUST in recent years, as shown in Fig. 1. The number of manuscripts received in 2010 was around 220, while in 2011 it will be closer to 300. This rate of annual increase is expected to be an ongoing trend. Between 2002 and 2004, TUST increased from 4 issues to 6 issues a year and this frequency of publication has remained constant at 6 since 2004. With the increasing number of submitted manuscripts and the number of papers published in TUST each year remaining approximately the same, the rejection rate for papers has necessarily increased over the past several years. This