LAUSR

This issue of the British Journal of Neurosurgery sees a change in the editorial team. Michael Jenkinson has stood down as Associate Editor after 10 years and editing 446 papers. He will be sorely missed but you will, I am sure, agree that his respite his well-deserved. And it is with pleasure that we welcome Puneet Plaha of Oxford to the role. This also being the last issue of the year, it seems as good an opportunity as any to review the Journal’s situation. We received 657 new and 268 revised submissions in the year to 22 November 2018. That compares with 536 new and 243 revised in the year to 22 November 2017, 390 and 162 in the year to November 2016, 508 and 194 in the year to November 2015 and 510 and 160 in the year before that, so about a 25% increase this year on what was previously a fairly steady submission rate. The past year’s figures include submissions from 49 countries. The top submitting countries were: the People’s Republic of China with 137 submissions followed by the United Kingdom with 101, India with 88, the United States with 36, Turkey with 31, Japan with 20, South Korea with 18, Iran with 18, Italy with 11, and Egypt with 10. Our overall acceptance rate has been 36% over the year, but this hides some variation by country with both the UK and USA being marginally over 50%. We had a slight increase in the impact factor for the 2017/18 report, which was 1.238. This is an interesting metric, but not one that influences editorial policy. Impact factors are published in the Journal Citation Reports every year and are calculated by dividing the number of citations that a journal receives over the previous two years by the number of articles they have published in the same period. Our current 1.238 compares with impact factors that ranged from 0.858 to 1.063 in the period from 2010 to 2016. It is the highest we have ever had, but this should be seen in the context of academic journals generally which have seen a steady increase in impact factors since the metric was introduced in 1975. The average increase of clinical neuroscience journals over the last 5 years has totalled about 20%. Impact factor is mainly related to the size of a journal’s audience. The highest journals in neurosurgery remain Neurosurgery at 4.475 and Journal of Neurosurgery at 4.319. The JNNP is higher at 7.144, but that reflects its larger audience among neurologists. For comparison, the impact factors of the British Journal of Surgery, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery are 5.433, 1.413 and 1.260, respectively. And now for our performance. The median time between submission and decision over the past year has stood at 70 days. This does conceal quite wide variations. For about 50 papers it has been over 120 days and the longest was 221 days. I’d like to be able to say that none of the long delays are my fault, but that is not true. I think I have now found all the corners of the ScholarOne online submission system where papers can lurk unnoticed! The usual cause for longer delays is the difficulties that we sometimes have finding referees. The work of both associate editors and referees is arduous, thankless and voluntary; and the process takes time. Your efforts in these tasks do not go unnoticed or unappreciated though I regret the opportunities to communicate those feelings are rare. One way of improving the prominence of these roles that is gaining popularity is to encourage referees or associate editors to submit commentaries that can be published with a paper, should they feel so inclined and be willing to waive their anonymity. This is something we would like to see more of in the BJNS. Not all papers are sent out for peer review and those with rapid turnaround are the ones that we deal with in-house. These tend to be case reports, technical notes, letters to the editor and neurosurgical images. Longer papers are generally sent out for review. For those papers we deal with in-house, acceptance is largely determined by interest and novelty. For technical notes and case reports to be publishable, we like them to be sufficiently novel that the message conveyed has not appeared in the literature more than six times including case reports and series. But, even this requires some judgment as to what the message is. So, for example, a tumour that has only previously been reported four times in children would be publishable. A tumour where all previous reports are over the age of the current case would be publishable. A tumour where all previous reports are smaller than the current one will be publishable. But, a tumour with several previous reports in their 40s and 60s and this one is in their 50s would probably not be publishable on grounds of unusual age. After we have decided what to publish, comes the matter of production. When a paper is accepted for publication, it is typeset and the galley proof is sent to the author for final corrections. Gallies, that is the trays in which hand set type was assembled, are no longer involved. Instead, PDF files are made for correction with an on-line proof-reading system that authors log on to. The article is given a unique identification number and published online. Then, six times a year, we assemble a collection of articles that have already been published online, with a newly written editorial into an issue. This issue is also published online with a unique journal identification number, and is printed on paper. So, some of the subscribers to the Journal received paper and online subscriptions and some online only. The journal contracts out the production of six issues per year, each of which has 120 pages. We can expand some issues in the year at the expense of others, but overall we have a limit of 720 pages per year. It is tempting to think that moving to online publication would allow more space, but this is not so because the cost of publishing contracts is largely determined by the cost of typesetting and proofing rather than the cost of manufacturing printed journals, and the cost saving by not printing on paper is fairly modest. The page limit has been the same for several years now. We have responded to the increased number of submissions that we now receive not by lowering the probability of acceptance, but rather by maintaining a backlog of papers that have been published online but not yet on paper. This backlog now stands at about 12 issues worth so 2 years.