Different wavelengths

I am surely not alone in being puzzled by the "Top journals in computer science" (Research intelligence, 14 May). By far the strangest inclusion was the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, a journal devoted to launching radio waves and their propagation. The IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication (ranked first), the IEEE Transactions on Communications (seventh) and the IEEE Communications Magazine (11th) are pretty mainstream electrical engineering journals and nothing to do with computer science. The accompanying footnote to the list states that the information was provided by Thomson Reuters, which will provide bibliometric data for the upcoming research excellence framework. If this is the quality of data on which the REF will be based, I suggest that the unease surrounding it should be replaced by blind panic.

Peter Rockett, Sheffield.