Congratulations to NC State Department of Computer Science Professor Tim Menzies on receiving a 2026 Springer Nature Editorial Contribution Award. Menzies has worked with Springer Nature’s Automated Software Engineering journal for over 15 years, first as an associate editor and as Editor-in-Chief since 2022. The journal covers and publishes research on AI and automation for building, testing and maintaining software.

Editing a journal as prolific and prestigious as Automated Software Engineering is no small feat. As Menzies put it, “I decide what the journal publishes. I read each new submission, then send the submissions to associate editors and reviewers. If reviewers disagree, I make the decision to accept or reject each paper. I recruit editorial board members and commission special issues. Ultimately, I set the direction of the journal and the standards for reproducibility and open data.”

Menzies takes these duties seriously, serving not just as an editor, but as a thought leader in the world of software engineering (SE), a position that puts him at the forefront of the field. 

“I see new work before anyone else does,” said Menzies. “That is not a chore; that is the best seat in the house. AI is changing how software gets built, and I get to watch it happen a year before it reaches the textbooks.”

One of an editor’s most important jobs is ensuring peer review, quality and accuracy are at the forefront of published research. In particular, peer review is especially important with the growing influence of AI in software engineering. 

“Editing is not glamorous work,” said Menzies, “and you read a lot of papers that will never be published. But someone has to check the work. Peer review keeps research honest, and volunteers do almost all of it. This kind of work is unpaid, it is invisible and it is the only thing standing between a careful result and a confident guess. I do my part. So should everyone.”

The rise of AI has contributed to a massive growth in submissions to software engineering publications. Research on artificial intelligence has boomed, while at the same time, AI tools have sped up the research process itself. This growth means that it is more important than ever to maintain rigorous standards and review in publishing. And Automated Software Engineering has seen an even larger growth in submissions than other SE journals. 

“When I started at Automated Software Engineering, we saw about twenty submissions a month,” said Menzies. “We now see over a hundred. Some of that is LLMs helping authors write faster. But every journal got that boost. Not every journal got five times the traffic. Does that make me proud? You bet.”

Thought leadership is more than just going to conferences and talking about one’s specialty. Thought leaders put in the work: bringing together subject matter experts, mentoring up-and-coming researchers, teaching and continuing to learn themselves.

John Grundy, Senior Deputy Dean and Professor of Software Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, serves as the steering committee chair of the conference (the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering) that feeds the journal. A longtime colleague of Menzies, Grundy had this to say about his leadership:

“Tim Menzies has provided exemplary leadership of the Automated Software Engineering journal. Among his many contributions, Menzies has revamped the editorial board with many new leading researchers. While submissions to the journal have dramatically increased, he has dramatically decreased the time from submission to first decision. Menzies has broadened the journal to include tools, reviews and other publication innovations. All of this has improved the journal’s overall quality and impact factor.”