Wos and there are 31 members of the editorial board. This note is based on reading Vol 1, no. 1.
According to the introduction by Wos, the field of automated reasoning (AR) was born around 1979. He expects that AR will become a dominant theory of computer science in the coming years. The first paper (by many authors) surveys several subfields of AR. For instance, logic programming, program verification, automatic theorem proving, expert systems, automatic theorem proving based on non-classical logical formalisms and program synthesis. As conceived by the editors, the field of automatic reasoning encompasses all these fields, thus, broadly interpreted, the scope of the journal is all of AI. It is to be hoped that in practice the journal will focus more sharply on those parts of the field which truly involve automatic reasoning in a non trivial way, such as logic programming and automatic theorem proving.
Then there are three papers. The first one by J. S. Bennet gives an extensive description for a meta expert system named ROGET. ROGET is an intelligent tool that assists in the early stages of knowledge acquisition for an expert system. It is shown that early stages of the MYCIN expert system can be easily reconstructed using ROGET.
Secondly, a paper by C. Lengauer indicates an application of the BOYER-MOORE program verifyer on verifying the correctness of certain program transformations. These transformations are used to transform sequential algorithms to parallel ones during compilation.
Finally, there is a Problem Corner section, of which the actual content is a description of formalised reasoning using a non-Horn-clause format.
Some remarks can be made about the general setup of this journal (1) It is not self-evident that automated reasoning is a well-defined subfield of artificial intelligence.
(2) There are several other journals where papers of this type can be published.
(3) Clearly, the amount of literature concerning artificial intelligence and expert systems will increase in the coming years, so extra journal capacity may be quite welcome. (4) The actual quality of the papers in the first volume is somewhat disappointing to me. (5) For institutes that work in the area of artificial intelligence, subscription to this journal is, of course, important and not too expensive.