Abstract
After eight years of serving as an editor for Cephalalgia and handling some 4000 submissions during this time, it is with humility and great gratitude that, looking back, I can say: Yes indeed, it was fun! At least almost always.
What made the difference exactly? First and foremost, the fact that I had the privilege to work with such a wonderful and dedicated team of headache experts all over the world, discussing science, methods, and novelties. Cephalalgia’s associated editors, genuine specialists from all corners of the world, are truly irreplaceable in the success story of our journal. With research moving at a fast pace, the editorial board discussed lively and then supported and helped to realize vital developments such as the installment of junior editors, the launch of Cephalalgia’s sister journal Cephalalgia Reports and the huge task of transitioning Cephalalgia from a subscription – to an open access journal. I am particularly grateful that the IHS board also accepted and fully supported this important step- since this meant diminishing financial revenues from the publisher. As a charity, the purpose of the IHS is to advance headache science, education, and management and promote headache awareness worldwide. Therefore, it is only logical to make all content that Cephalalgia publishes, freely available. And all this with the greatest asset of Cephalalgia: To be truly independent and solely dedicated to science, refusing advertisements in any form, and keeping maximal transparency of conflicts of interest: the editor of Cephalalgia must receive no personal funding from industry. These two principles: editor independence and abstaining from industry advertisement, is a self-concept of which the editorial board of Cephalalgia is very proud.
In football and science, we are facing the same problem: How to build the next team and how to raise the next generation? I am particularly grateful to the more senior editors who embraced the idea of an editor trainee program and personally took on young colleagues as newly appointed junior editors, aiding them in learning the technical and methodological tools, understanding the workflow as well as the intellectual focus of editorial work. It is one of the great success stories of the last eight years that many junior editors became - and still are – full editors of Cephalalgia. Our junior editors proved to be highly dedicated and true experts in their fields, with their thoughtful comments and balanced review of submitted manuscripts. I always perceived their input as exceptionally valuable for the journal.
It is fair to say that Cephalalgia is among the best headache journals in the world and continues as such because of the broad range of interests of the associate editors who have all worked very hard to recommend and solicit high-quality expert reviews. For our authors, it is important to receive such balanced and high-quality reviews and to get them in due time. I am particularly proud that during the difficult years of the pandemic, where paradoxically submissions significantly increased, our reviewers and associated editors also dedicated more time for reviews. The time from submission to first decision kept amazingly stable and indeed continues to slightly decrease. And above all, a big thank you to a very special person who was indispensable for editors, reviewers and authors alike: Wendy Krank is such a wonderful, outstanding, invaluable support as managing editor, truly involved in each single step from first submission where she tirelessly helps authors to bring manuscripts into shape, chasing reviewers, helping associate editors and making sure that accepted papers get a last polish before sending them to production. Cephalalgia would not be the same without her.
What have I learned as editor-in-chief?
To be honest, no-one is born as an editor. Despite having published more than 300 scientific papers myself, I had to go back to school and learn most things about publishing simply by doing them. I was- and indeed still am- very enthusiastic about what I learned. Looking back, there were three things I learned that I did not anticipate: Publishing has a lot to do with networking, trust, and friends. When I was appointed in 2015, the concept of altmetrics was only four years old and no-one took artificial intelligence (AI) particularly seriously. Since it was not known whether altmetrics, i.e. how often a given paper was cited in the lay press, would influence how often scientists would cite it. As an editor, I became interested in this matter and together with Mario Peres, we investigated this in a randomized study on 48 papers published in Cephalalgia (1). The results showed that better social media-promoted papers are significantly more often cited and downloaded. This means that it is simply not enough to publish a paper, one must additionally promote science and be a good networker in order to be successful. For Cephalalgia, this implies that we must intensify our efforts to promote what we publish, to get heard. Of course, active promotion costs money.
The other lesson came with the advent and consecutive hype of AI (2). AI can be used in different scientific scenarios, starting with more sophisticated methods, like understanding big data and writing, and does not end with reporting of scientific results in the lay press. Science faces several huge challenges since some of these scenarios can be an opportunity and some a serious threat. Despite this multifaceted challenge, we used AI and could replicate earlier studies (3) using all available publications on headache medicine. The question is: What drives citation counts? Using a machine learning approach, the answer is simple: Bibliometric data such as first and last author with many citations and high h-index predict whether a headache research paper will have few (<5), some (6–14), or many (>14) citations, five years after publication date (paper in preparation). It is very simple: Scientists and institutions who are well known in the field, pull citations. Scientists who are not known are disadvantaged. It seems that trust (in scientific rigor and quality) plays a bigger role in who can publish and get cited, than content. Again, the lesson is that one needs to promote science and be a good networker in order to be successful. The immediate consequence for someone new in the field is how important it is to find a mentor (with a good track record) in order to build an own name and reputation and later to publish and get cited. Indeed, finding good mentors is perhaps the most important lesson and IHS as a society should perhaps look more into promoting individual mentoring programs in addition to already successful programs such as iHead. The third lesson, however, surprised me most: How much in publishing is built on trust. Despite all quality checks, strict adherence to reporting guidelines and checklists, usage of plagiarism software and rigorous peer-review, at the end of the day, as a reviewer and as an editor, one must trust that what is reported is true. This is why Cephalalgia is, and always has been, proud to strictly follow rules and guidelines of transparency and tenets of registration as well as the highest scientific standards and Cephalalgia will always adhere to these principles.
My last words go to our reviewers. They are the crucial border that authors, ideas, and good manuscripts have to cross in order to get published. Without them, one of the tenets of science- the fair and independent “review of peers” would come to a halt. What is perhaps not always appreciated is that most authors but also most reviewers are members of the IHS. Why do they sacrifice their time and review for free? Because they are in the field, and they are interested and curious, or perhaps because they want to publish and will need others to peer review their work in return, or most certainly because they are part of the small but exquisite headache family. They do it because they are experts in what they do and most of all because they are members of the IHS. The IHS should acknowledge this and pay for reviews in return, perhaps a waiver for own papers, perhaps a waiver to take part at an IHS congress? Headache is a small world, it is not all about money. We can be proud of what we have all achieved so far and yes- we need trust and continue to support each other.
