Abstract
This month we are ringing the changes a little in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery. Although this is one of our ‘Clinical Practice’ editions of the journal, eagle-eyed readers among you will notice that the issue does not contain any review papers and that the papers are formatted in our ‘Classic’ rather than ‘Clinical Practice’ style.
JFMS likes to think big! As it continues to grow and develop, the focus is to balance the interests of authors and readers
The reason for this is simple – we have been receiving a growing number of excellent papers for publication in JFMS, and we are now in the enviable position of having an ‘embarrassment of riches’! However, this has created a problem insofar as we now have a backlog of manuscripts awaiting publication in print. Upon acceptance, papers are rapidly published OnlineFirst (ahead of print); still, we are keen – for our authors’ sake – that the time from acceptance of a paper to it appearing in print is not excessively delayed.
We have therefore taken the decision to devote this ‘Clinical Practice’ edition of JFMS, and likewise the January 2017 edition, to publishing a collection of submitted clinical research papers.
These are all papers with a very direct relevance to clinical practice and each contributes important new information.
For the future, we have been planning carefully with our friends and colleagues at SAGE to try to avoid a similar situation developing again. This will involve more flexibility with page numbers to give us a little more leeway in terms of the number of articles we are able to publish in each issue.
We do not want or intend JFMS to grow to such a size that readers become overwhelmed by the amount of information and the number of papers in each issue. Equally, our mission is to publish the best clinically relevant information on feline medicine and surgery; and, as such, we would not want to exclude valuable manuscripts. Our focus is to get the balance right – both for our authors and our readers. You will likely find that next year there are issues of JFMS that contain one or two more papers than in the past. This purely reflects the number of high quality papers we are receiving and the good research that is being done – something that is of benefit to all of us and to the cats entrusted to our care.
In the meantime, please enjoy this collection of papers on analgesia and therapeutics, and be assured that normal service will be resumed shortly …