Taking stock and moving forward
Editor-in-Chief E-mail: d.barlow{at}clinmed.gla.ac.uk
This Editorial is my last as Editor-in-Chief of Human Reproduction, and it seems no time at all since I wrote my first six years ago. When I took up the position, it was already decided that the Editor-in-Chief would change again after 6 years, and that time has now arrived. This approach ensures intermittent renewal of the leadership of the journal and helps sustain fresh thinking. In my Editorial in the recent October issue of Human Reproduction, I welcomed the new Editor-in-Chief, Professor André Van Steirteghem, and I have confidence that the journal will be in good hands.
As Editor-in-Chief, I have written relatively few Editorials but have concentrated on providing them only when there was a significant point to be made, usually about journal policy and standards. I feel that my final issue justifies an Editorial, and in it, I mark the progress that the journal has made over these half dozen years.
What has been achieved has been a team effort involving not only the Editorial Office group lead by Dr Helen Beard and Dr Andy Williams but also the vital contribution of the many specialized Associate Editors and more recently the Deputy Editors. The panel of Associate Editors has been an integral part of the journal’s decision-making process since the change of Editor-in-Chief in 2000. They, together, deal with nearly 2000 submissions per year, and they are selected to span the range of specialist topics in the scope of the journal. They integrate referees’ reports and make initial recommendations on articles and suggest levels of priority for publication. All of the difficult decisions and the final judgments on priority then come back to me, as Editor-in-Chief. The Associate Editors are appointed for 2 years, which can be extended to 3 or, exceptionally, 4 years. The contribution of this group to the ongoing success of the journal has been of critical importance. The Associate Editor’s contribution is to draw out the key issues that may require revision when the two referees agree. Where the referees disagree, the Associate Editor provides a third referee report, and the Editor-in-Chief adjudicates. The Associate Editors thus provide the backbone of this high volume process, which needs to be efficient if journal performance is to be kept under control and hopefully improved. Overall, the Associate Editors have exceeded the performance we felt could reasonably be expected of them, with their average time to reach a decision, following receipt of the reviewers’ reports, being <7 days.
The Deputy Editors were introduced more recently, and they provide direct support to the Editor-in-Chief on difficult cases, appeals and strategic issues. Their support in the past year has been very valuable, and I am now able to share thinking around difficult issues by e-mail that I had to deal with alone previously. Strength of our process is that there is no Editorial Board structure whose processes can easily have the effect of slowing decision-making around the pattern of Editorial Board Meetings. I am sure that this has been a factor in the performance that has been achieved.
The journal aims to be a leading research journal in the field of reproduction and being an ESHRE journal, to address subject areas of interest to the wide scope of ESHRE. In addressing these aims, I have tried to consider the needs and interests of both readers and authors in directing our policies.
I have steered the journal to provide readers with good-quality articles in their areas of interest, and where possible to provide stimulating discussion and debate papers that address many controversies in reproduction. Although we have published systematic research reviews, such as Cochrane Reviews, and some focused Mini-Reviews, we do not normally publish review articles because that is the particular remit of our sister journal, Human Reproduction Update. I took the scope of ESHRE as a fair definition of the scope of the journal, and this limited the publication of pregnancy research to articles addressing largely first trimester aspects, and some other topics were only considered to be within the scope of the Human Reproduction if the focus of the article is linked to reproductive interventions. Typical examples are cancer studies or obstetric outcome research. In the first couple of years, it was quite common to have to turn articles away as being outside the scope of the journal, but this has settled down and is now a relatively rare event. There was also a widening of scope to encourage aspects of the ESHRE scope that had not tended to appear in the journal. Examples are post-reproductive issues, such as menopause, and some aspects of gynaecological surgery.
I have seen it as important that Human Reproduction should have a good profile and relationship with authors because this helps ensure that the journal might be their first option for good articles. Authors will have different priorities, but I believe that important components are that authors will prefer to select a journal that is prominent with the right audience, that has a good impact factor and that will provide decisions reasonably promptly. At another level, I also believe that the journal should be prepared to give authors a fair hearing where they feel that the decision on their article has not been sound. On this last aspect, it has been reassuring that, of 
2000 submissions each year, we receive only a small number of appeals against decisions from concerned authors. Although many appeals are not upheld, there have been cases where a decision has been reversed following an appeal. When an author makes a case that appears worth considering, it has been our practice to consider re-reviewing the article, and usually this substantiates the original decision, but a small number of adjudications have been reversed. I do not regard this as a weakness but rather see it as a sign of the journal’s confidence that it does not have to be defensive and that it is able to accept that occasionally the peer review process can come to a less than optimal decision. Most recently, we have been able to speed up the assessment phase on appeals by involving the Deputy Editors rather than the longer process of re-review. This is proving to be an effective safeguard.
Another area in which the Deputy Editors have proved an invaluable asset is in assisting me with difficult task of adjudicating in cases of suspected or proven ‘publication misconduct’. Included here is plagiarism, double publication (including ‘salami slicing’) and, more rarely, data manipulation. I am pleased with the way in the journal’s practices, and processes have evolved to deal with these cases in a fair, yet firm, way. This topic has been covered in more detail in a recent Human Reproduction Editorial (see Barlow, 2006
).
The time that journals take to make decisions around the acceptance or rejection of articles is a matter of real concern to many authors. Clearly, speed of decision-making is less important than reaching sound decisions, but there are many situations where it is important to authors that the decision on their article does not take months. This is especially the case if one of the authors is applying for a post or is being assessed for promotion. In these situations, a CV entry that states that a article is ‘in press’ is so much more valuable than one that says ‘submitted’. We have monitored our performance on the time interval between the submission of a article and a decision on acceptance or rejection as well as the time from decision to publication. We have seen these times shorten substantially over the past 6 years. In 2001, the average time from the submission to the decision was 12 weeks, and by 2005, this was 5 weeks. In 2001, the average time interval from receiving a finalized accepted manuscript back from the authors to publication was 12 weeks, and by 2005, thanks to online publishing, the time was just 5 weeks. Thus, the average total journal time from submission to publication has come down from 24 weeks to 10 weeks; aside from delays when the article is with the authors when revisions are necessary. Most importantly, with the average time to a decision being 5 weeks and with 95 percent of decisions made within 8 weeks, authors can know that if they choose Human Reproduction, they will have a decision within weeks rather than months. These performance developments over the past 6 years are shown in Figures 1 and 2.
|
|
These decision times will encourage authors to consider this journal, but even more influential will be the journal’s impact factor; a metric that has become a surrogate measure of a journal’s prominence in its field. In the impact factor terminology, ‘fields’ are termed ‘subject categories’. Simply comparing journals without reference to subject categories is misleading, because the level of impact factor achievable by journals in a particular field is related to the number of journals in that field and therefore the number of articles published in that field. This is because these are the likely source of citations within that field, and the number of citations to the articles in a journal is what the impact factor reflects with, of course, the most important articles receiving the largest numbers within the field/subject category. In the subject categories that are relevant to Human Reproduction, top journals will normally have factors in the 3 to 4 range. In some fields, these would not be regarded as high scores, but there are other fields whose top journals would score below this range. Despite the attention paid to journal impact factors, many people are unaware of the constraints on how the factors are calculated; yet, without that insight, they will misunderstand the implications.
Specifically, the impact factor reflects the average citation in the world literature that articles in a journal achieve in a given year. The articles eligible for assessment are the articles published in a journal in the 2 years before the year of assessment. Thus, the current 2005 score will reflect the citations in the world literature in 2005 to articles published in a journal in the years 2003 and 2004. Within this system, for the 2005 index, citation to articles published before 2003 or rapid citation to articles published in 2005 does not register. Anyone interested to understand more about impact factors and other citation indices should examine the ISI Web of Knowledge where the rules and their implications, as well as the scores, are clearly presented (www.isiknowledge.com).
This journal features in the subject categories ‘obstetrics and gynaecology’ and ‘reproductive biology’. The former currently includes 57 and the latter 24 journals. In both fields, the three ESHRE journals have done very well, and Human Reproduction has been in the first few in each of these subject categories year on year. The impact factor of Human Reproduction has risen from 2.997 in 2000 to 3.669 in 2005, and for its subject areas, this places it in the group of top journals. This rating for Human Reproduction reflects the quality of the articles published and the continuing ability of the journal to attract the best work in reproductive medicine and biology through a combination of the good impact and efficient decision making.
With the explosion of online access to journals, we appreciate that the journal’s interface with most of the world will now be through the website. It is a great encouragement to see that the Human Reproduction website received 500000 hits last year, and 2.5 million web pages were downloaded. The most popular downloads are summarized in Table I. It is clear that the journal is attracting considerable attention from the reproductive medicine and science community, and I am sure that is what ESHRE would wish.
|
With this continuing good performance and increasing competition for publication in the journal, it will be necessary to further raise the standards demanded of articles, and this will affect the acceptance rates. Currently, the acceptance rate at original submission is
20% and rises to 35%, taking into account invited resubmissions that become accepted after revision(s). As a result, authors need to appreciate that articles will be rejected which will be suitable for publication elsewhere, but when facing the strong competition for publication in Human Reproduction, we have to make hard decisions one article against another. These hard decisions are part of the role an Editor-in-Chief has to encompass, but we believe that part of the ongoing process of developing the journal as a leader in its fields is the progressive raising of standards. This is a goal of ESHRE, and it strongly endorses the approach we have taken at Human Reproduction and will now be taken forward by the new Editor-in-Chief.
|
 |
Reference |
|---|
 Top Reference |
|---|
Barlow D. (2006) Human Reproduction – the next phase in its development. Hum Reprod 21:2463–2465.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||