Abstract
Following the editorship of Dr Nevin Scrimshaw, described in rich commentary in the March issue of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin, 1 the next era of the journal began in 2003. I became Editor-in-Chief after a decade of service as Associate Editor, and in my first editorial in the September issue of that year, I wrote, “We hope to continue the capacity-building editorial mission started by Dr Scrimshaw and will make it a priority to add to the usefulness, distribution, and reputation of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin (FNB), which remains the best way of reaching the widest distribution of nutrition scientists and leaders throughout the world.” 2 I hope that readers today will judge us to have been successful in those efforts.
This first editorial included a description of the unusual history of the journal, which began under the United Nations University’s World Hunger Program and later became the journal of the International Nutrition Foundation. It also included a note on the able managers who for those first decades ensured that the careful scholarship of our authors was translated correctly, issue after issue, into ink on paper: Ms Edwina Murray, who was Assistant Editor and then Managing Editor with unsurpassed competence and dedication for a decade and a half; Ms Susan Karcz, who assumed the role of Managing Editor in 2002 and soon thereafter managed the transition of our editorial office to Tufts University. To these names, I wish to add Michelle Badash, who replaced Susan Karcz as Managing Editor for the September issue of 2007. Michelle carried the journal through its conversion from print to primarily online publication, and she ably supervised its management during the transition to SAGE Publishing in 2015.
Some of the accomplishments of the era of the Bulletin’s history from 2003 to 2017 will be enumerated below and expanded upon with some historically important citations from the Bulletin. Among those developments were the strengthening of the orientation of the Bulletin to policy-relevant articles, which were for the first time emphasized as “Food and Nutrition Policy” as a regular feature of the journal. Particularly, we expanded the use of supplements to focus on scientific advances in policy-relevant issues.
Supplements and Food and Nutrition Policy
The period of 2003 to 2017 saw a major up-tick in the numbers of special-theme supplements published. More than 30 separately-bound supplements were published in FNB during this period, with additional mini-supplements embedded in the quarterly issues of the journal.
Two publications in 2006 from the United Nations agencies seemed especially to encourage the flow of new submissions, which continued over the remainder of the period. The first was the WHO Child Growth Standards, 3 joined by an important FNB supplement that year on development of the new standards. 4 This moved thinking away from curves as a reference for comparison to a prescriptive and universal standard for growth through the first 59 months of life. As compared to the previous international references, under-fives were to be taller but lighter in weight than previously considered. Researchers around the world sought to update the prevalence of stunting and underweight in their settings in accordance with the new standards. This, in turn, cast interest on the determinants of failure to grow. The largest spotlight in the pages of FNB was shone on complementary and supplementary feeding, its composition and preparation, and its role in assisting growth to better follow the central tendencies of the World Health Organization (WHO) standards.
The other publication of impact was the WHO/Food and Agriculture Organization Guidelines for Food Fortification with Micronutrients. 5 Twelve technical papers for its preparation were subsequently published as a supplement in the Bulletin, 6 and a flood of new research emerged, spurring 14 new papers on fortification over the following year. Exploration and validation of approaches with new vehicles such as water and rice were seen in the journal. Table salt was fortified with up to 6 micronutrients. Home fortification of complementary foods with powders was examined, both to prevent early-life anemia and bridging gaps to achieve the growth standards. Parallel to the fortification of processed foods emerged the proof-of-principle to enrich the edible portions of foods in vivo by genetic cross-breeding. This was notable with orange-fleshed sweet potato and orange maize experiences in east Africa.
Among these was a policy brief in March 2010, “Scaling up Nutrition: a Framework for Action,” which was a major development in the policy world under the special auspices of the World Bank. 7 With this focus on policy-relevant research, there was a strong orientation to a functional redefinition of the impact of the Bulletin on food and nutrition policy in developing countries.
It was also during this period that the journal accepted the opportunity to focus on important prizes in the field of nutrition by announcing the competition and publishing the biannual lecture of the Rainer Gross Prize, whose latest winner is published in this issue, 8 and the Abraham Horowitz Prize by PAHO for nutrition excellence in Latin America.
Sustainable Food Security and Emerging Nutritional Concerns
The journal served to highlight emerging trends in the field of nutrition science and policy, examples of which included the importance of environmental enteric dysfunction in a 2014 supplement on approaches to severe acute malnutrition 9 and enlarged concern with the shift toward emergencies in global food aid in development in a 2009 article by Webb. 10 Emerging importance of biotech approaches to nutrition and the food supply were highlighted in a supplement in 2005. 11
Examples of the sharpened focus on policy-related publications can be identified in the 2004 issue of the Bulletin with the printing of the Berlin statement on contributions and risks to sustainable food security, with the report of an International Workshop on Food Aid. 12 This focus on policy continued in 2005 with the publication of the article, “What can food policy do to redirect the diet transition?” which was a reprint of a paper by Lawrence Haddad as an International Food Policy Research Institute working paper. 13 This was also an example of the identification of the journal with the important global diet transition. The same volume saw the publication of, “The Des Moines Declaration: A call for accelerated action in agriculture, food and nutrition to end poverty and hunger,” authored by the laureates of the World Food Prize; this publication was an early contribution to the emerging emphasis on environmental sustainability while meeting the nutritional needs of the growing global population. 14 We began a new focus on nutrition in emergencies by publishing an article by Patrick Webb on the nutritional challenges after the tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia. 15 In the 2006 volume, we published the Mysore declaration on capacity strengthening in nutrition, which was the report of a meeting of 70 international nutrition scientists. 16 In the 2011 volume, we published a supplement on mainstreaming nutrition in national policy agendas as follow-up to the 2010 Scaling Up Nutrition policy brief. 17 Along with a sharper focus on research in the field of interventions of nutritional approaches to the prevention and treatment of child malnutrition, we used these articles with a focus on policy to extend the impact of our journal on emerging needs and policies in developing countries.
Perhaps most impactful during the period of my editorship was the transition from the previous publisher to SAGE Publishing, an academic press that has given the journal a substantially larger platform in global publishing, both in print and online. The transition to a larger expression of the Bulletin’s publishing in online format preceded the transition to SAGE and had already changed substantially the way in which our readership could access the Bulletin’s publications. The enlarged online access under SAGE contributed substantially to the capacity building efforts and real impact that were at the core of the journal’s mission. To this end, we also joined the Research4Life partnership, which allows us to waive page charges and provide free institutional subscriptions in developing countries. Today the Bulletin reaches readers and authors through free subscriptions granted to thousands of institutions in more than 120 low-income countries around the world.
Real impact—on the advancement of nutrition science, on global nutrition policy, and on human nutrition in its broadest sense—has been a continued focus of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin since its founding and will continue to be so in the years to come. This represents a very different measure from the way the publishing field measures the “impact” of journals, which has led us to an increased effort to redirect the discussion in journal publishing field from an Impact Factor, which is formally defined as a citation index number, to one which might better measure the actual impact of an article in the journal on translation of emerging science policy to application. This is part of continuing discussion in the publication field, and it is one in which SAGE Publications has expressed increasing interest and some novel ideas. It is our hope and intention that the Food and Nutrition Bulletin with our publisher may provide leadership and even new metrics toward a redefinition of real impact, to measure the extent to which there was an influence on science development or policy development in any given country or region. I hope to expand on this effort in a later commentary in this anniversary year.