NDT Advance Access originally published online on December 24, 2007
Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 2008 23(1):1-3; doi:10.1093/ndt/gfm877
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Editorial Note
To coincideAuthor: Please check whether the Editorial Note is OK as set. with this first NDT issue of 2008, the editors would like to wish all our readers, reviewers, editorial board members and collaborators good health and success in their private and professional lives over the coming year. Traditionally, a short report from the editorial office is published in the January issue of the journal.
The editorial offices are located in Ghent (Norbert Lameire), Aachen (Jürgen Floege) and London (David C. Wheeler). Whereas all manuscripts are received and processed in Ghent, Jürgen Floege deals specifically with experimental papers and the section ‘Translational Nephrology’, while David C. Wheeler supervises case reports, some educational features and the supplements. We do, of course, greatly value the support we receive from our section and subject editors and our reviewers.
The year 2007 was to some extent bedevilled by technical modifications to the Manuscript Central system, which caused not only many headaches in the editorial offices, but was a source of frustration and irritation to our subject editors and reviewers.
Nearly all subject editors were ‘retrained’ in using the modified system, creating extra work for the editorial offices. Fortunately, most of the problems have now been resolved and the reviewing process is at present running rather smoothly. We thank everybody for their patience and understanding in dealing with this matter.
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Manuscript flow and evaluation |
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Between 1 January and 11 November 2007, a total of 2726 manuscripts were submitted to NDT and 100 to NDTPlus (Table 1). An increase in the number of submissions over the previous year (2601 in the same interval) is thus evident, although the rate of increase in submissions per year is slowing. This may of course change in 2008 with the introduction of NDTPlus, the new educational sister journal of NDT.
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Table 2 shows the number of manuscripts submitted between 1 January and 11 November 2007 (all articles) according to country of origin. Manuscripts from Europe (including Turkey) represent the majority (41.5%) of all submissions but a wide range of other regions are also represented. This diverse origin of manuscripts reflects the growing international popularity of NDT and, hopefully, broader recognition of the journal.
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As explained in our editorial of July 2007 [1], in view of this increasing number of submissions, we needed to expand our pool of subject editors to enable us to distribute incoming manuscripts amongst a broader range of experts, whilst keeping their workload within reasonable limits.
All manuscripts, including the invited ones, are peer reviewed and we acknowledge the efforts of busy subject editors and reviewers, individuals who generally have many other educational, research, clinical and administrative tasks to accomplish. The editors strongly rely on the advice of the subject editors and reviewers in order to ensure a fair and high-quality evaluation of original work, and to maintain the continuing high standards of the educational features published in the journal.
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Turnover rate |
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TopManuscript flow and evaluationTurnover rateImpact factorSize of the journal...References |
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The turnover rate with respect to handling new papers assigned to subject editors and reviewers, and to making a final decision on a manuscript after review, averages less than two working days in the three offices of NDT, Ghent, Aachen and London. For manuscripts originally submitted between 1 January and 11 November 2007, and for which a final decision has been taken between 1 January and 11 November 2007, a first decision is reached after an average of 22.56 days.
Table 3 summarizes the total number of papers and the acceptance and rejection rates per manuscript type for the first 10 months of 2007. As we predicted in our editorial of January 2007 [2], the acceptance rate, in particular for the original papers, has decreased from approximately 35% in 2004 to 24% in the first 10 months of 2007. Not surprisingly, invited papers like editorial comments, reviews and translational nephrology papers have a much higher acceptance rate.
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Impact factor |
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TopManuscript flow and evaluationTurnover rateImpact factorSize of the journal...References |
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As shown in Figure 1, the impact factor of NDT has increased steadily over the years and reached 3.154 in 2007. Excluding journals that only publish review articles, NDT occupies the fifth place in the ranking of nephrology journals. This result is largely attributable to the efforts of the previous editorial team under the guidance of Tilman Drueke.Author: Please check whether the caption provided to figure 1 is correct.
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Although encouraging, we may remind our readers of our previous editorial [2] in which we included discussion of the ‘relative’ value that should be attributed to this factor. There is without any doubt an influence of the impact factor of any journal on its ability to attract the highest quality articles. In particular, young academic researchers will attempt to publish their best papers in the journal with the highest profile and the highest impact factor. Despite much criticism concerning the use of the impact factor, there is evidence to suggest that many faculties and promotion, tenure and funding bodies have used this imperfect (but readily calculable) tool to evaluate individual researchers or research groups [3,4]. We hope that, regardless of the increase in the impact factor, NDT will become even more attractive to both young and established investigators planning to submit papers for publication.
Our new educational journal, NDTPlus, was launched on the web in August 2007 and the first printed version will reach you in February 2008 [1]. We hope that NDTPlus will attract manuscripts of high educational value. The reviewing process of these manuscripts will be as stringent as for the parent journal, meaning that only high-quality material will be published. As a result, we hope that NDTPlus will rapidly be incorporated in Medline and be assigned an impact factor in the near future.
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Size of the journal and backlog of the printed papers |
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TopManuscript flow and evaluationTurnover rateImpact factorSize of the journal...References |
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Readers would have noticed that the page number of recent issues of NDT has increased. Despite a lower acceptance rate, the increasing number of manuscripts has led to a size that is almost no longer ‘bearable’. In addition, despite the fact that papers are published on the journal's website within 3–4 weeks of acceptance, there is still a considerable backlog of manuscripts for the printed edition. This highlights another reason why our educational journal NDTPlus was created. We hope that over the next year, the time it takes from a manuscript being accepted to appearing in print, which is now 4–5 months, can be reduced to an acceptable 2–3 months.
We would like to repeat our expression of sincere gratitude to all members of the editorial board, the subject and section editors, the editorial staff as well as the publisher for all their help over the last year. At the end of this issue, we acknowledge all our reviewers for their efforts over the last year.
Finally, we would like to thank the ERA-EDTA council for investing their trust in us, for their advice and for the material support they continue to provide.
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References |
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TopManuscript flow and evaluationTurnover rateImpact factorSize of the journal...References |
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- Lameire N, Floege J, Wheeler DC. Changes to the editorial board and the launch of NDTPlus. Nephrol Dial Transplant (2007) 22:1805.
[Free Full Text] - Lameire N, Floege J, Wheeler DC. Report from the editorial office. Nephrol Dial Transplant (2007) 22:1–2.
[Free Full Text] - Chew M, Villanueva EV, Van Der Weyden MB. Life and times of the impact factor: retrospective analysis of trends for seven medical journals (1994–2005) and their Editors’ views. J R Soc Med (2007) 100:142–150.
[Abstract/Free Full Text] - Kurmis AP. Understanding the limitations of the journal impact factor. J Bone Joint Surg Am (2003) 85-A:2449–2454. Author: Please provide the history date of this article.
[Abstract/Free Full Text]
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