Abstract
Dear Readers,
It has been 3 years since I took over as Editor in Chief of Vascular Medicine. My older family members and senior colleagues always caution about the accelerated passage of time … but it hasn’t been until the past few years that I have bought into this concept. Indeed, in terms of my leadership of Vascular Medicine, how quickly time has flown. Since I took over in January 2014, we have accomplished much, but there is still much work to do as we continue to make our Journal the go-to source for original research and review articles in our field. As I reflect on the end of the first 3-year cycle of our Editorial Board (our freshman term, if you will), I want to take this opportunity to briefly update our readership on some achievements of our Editorial Board and our future plans.
First of all, I am delighted to inaugurate a new feature in this issue of the Journal, with our first CME review article. In partnership with the Society for Vascular Medicine (SVM) and the University of Virginia, we are now able to offer CME credit to members of SVM for state-of-the-art review articles. Dr Aditya Sharma, a vascular medicine specialist at the University of Virginia, has joined our Editorial Board as the CME Section Editor. Our first article selected for CME is Antithrombotic Therapy in Aortic Diseases: A Narrative Review by Francois Caron and Sonia Anand, and appears in this issue. 1 For SVM members, the test questions and the ability to claim CME credit are located on the SVM website (www.vascularmed.org). We will run up to two CME review articles per issue, and each article will offer 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. Dr Sharma is currently developing a series of Core Curriculum in Vascular Medicine CME review articles that will cover key vascular medicine topics with a series of well-written, comprehensive, yet concise and practical reviews.
One of my top priorities in taking over as Editor in Chief of Vascular Medicine was to increase the volume of high quality scientific manuscripts and review articles submitted to our Journal and to maximize the efficiency of our peer review process, including time to first decision and time to publication. We have had some successes in this regard. Manuscript submissions to our Journal have increased from 264 in 2014 to 395 in 2016, a 50% increase. Despite the increase in volume, our time to first decision remains at an all-time low for our Journal, and we have more content available Online First than ever before. This is all good news for our Journal, and in accomplishing this I must acknowledge that this is truly a team effort of our Editorial Board and particularly our core editorial team – our Managing Editor, Ms Valerie Clark, and our Associate Editors, Drs Naomi Hamburg, Anne Hamik, William Hiatt, Esther Kim, Robert McBane, and Mehdi Shishehbor, and our Images Editor, Dr Steven Dean. I am pleased to report that this team will be staying on for another 3-year term with our Journal. I am also pleased to report that Dr Tara Mastracci, a vascular surgeon from Royal Free Hospital in London, and Dr Ehrin Armstrong, an interventional cardiologist and vascular specialist from the University of Colorado, will be joining our group of Associate Editors.
I need to take a moment to acknowledge the phenomenon that our ‘Vascular Disease Patient Information Page’ has become. This section, which is edited by Drs Natalie Evans and Elizabeth Ratchford, has been a popular addition to our Journal, in print and online. Covering common and uncommon diagnoses, as well as procedures and therapeutic treatments in a vascular practice,2–5 these articles are among the most downloaded each month from our Journal, and I have heard first-hand from vascular colleagues that these articles are routinely downloaded, printed, and given to patients. These documents have become a useful tool in my own vascular practice. I would like to thank our publisher, SAGE, for complimentary access to these articles through the Journal website (http://journals.sagepub.com/home/vmj) or the Society for Vascular Medicine website (vascularmed.org/patients). The latest patient page on advanced vascular imaging, written by Dr Joseph Lau and colleagues, is published in this issue of the Journal. 6
While our Journal has had a number of successes in the past 3 years, there remains much to do. I strongly believe that the impact factor of our Journal does not reflect the quality of our scientific manuscripts and reviews. Through our very timely publication process to Online First, increased downloads of our manuscripts, and increased ‘buzz’ about our Journal through social media (thanks to our Social Media Editor, Dr Anne Albers, @VMJ_SVM), my assessment is that our Journal is having a broader reach than in the past and that there is increased awareness of Vascular Medicine in the vascular community. As the impact factor lags a number of years behind the current issue of the Journal, we do not yet know the impact of our efforts. The 2016 impact factors will be released in the early summer of 2017. Stay tuned and hope with me for substantive progress on this metric.
The success of a Journal in terms of its scientific impact … and indeed its impact factor, relies not only on the activities of its Editors, but also depends upon the support of its authors. I would like to thank our authors worldwide who have submitted manuscripts for peer review. I continue to call upon our Journal readership, SVM membership, and the vascular community at large to submit their interesting work to Vascular Medicine. Think of us as a ‘first choice’ for papers that are within our scope and that are of interest to our readership and the vascular scientific community. In the coming years, I want to see more high quality basic vascular biology and translational studies, as well as primary or secondary analyses of randomized controlled trials. Send us your best work, and in exchange I promise you our best efforts to ensure a timely and thoughtful peer review, done by experts who truly understand vascular disease and vascular research.
Finally, I would like to close with a thank you to one other important group of individuals who have contributed to the early successes of my term at Vascular Medicine – our peer reviewers and guest editors. As you know, peer reviewers do their work anonymously to our authors, often in their own free time, and with no compensation, aside from the satisfaction of contributing to our Journal and our field. I appreciate your willingness to ‘pay it forward’ with the very high quality peer reviews that have informed my editorial decisions over the past 3 years. Being a reviewer is often a thankless job, so please accept my personal thanks. A list of peer reviewers and guest editors for Vascular Medicine is published annually in our December issue.
Thank you once again for your continued support of Vascular Medicine as I move into my sophomore term. As always, please contact us to discuss any future ideas you may have for our Journal or to discuss a manuscript concept at