Abstract
In every January issue of the Journal, we make it a point to acknowledge our Editorial Board members and reviewers for all their hard work. The work of a reviewer is necessarily hard and tedious to ensure a timely yet quality and robust peer-review process. The motivation for a reviewer is to help authors produce a better piece of research than that which was originally submitted. And they do all these anonymously without much tangible reward or recognition. The list of Editorial Board members and reviewers listed in this month’s issue provides an opportunity for us to recognize who they are and to thank them for their contribution to our Journal.
The Journal now has 34 Editorial Board members. These are selected on merit, mainly based on the quality of their reviews over the years. Many of our Board members are leading hand surgeons of international reputation and we welcome their expertise and contribution to global hand surgery research. A question that has been commonly asked when someone is invited to join the Editorial Board is, what is the difference between an Editorial Board member and a reviewer? Other than being tasked to review more articles, it doesn’t seem there is much of a difference at times! It has therefore been a delight to see more involvement of the Editorial Board members over the past few years. We at the Journal see the Board members as an extension of the editorial team and are grateful for their contribution in terms of commentaries, review articles and other editorial initiatives. We hope this collaboration between the editors and Editorial Board members will continue to be strengthened in the years to come.
There are many elements in the making of a journal, but the work of reviewing remains central to maintaining high standards. In addition to the work of reviewing, behind the scenes, the editorial office carefully check the first submissions, invite and collate reviews before sending them to the editors who then make the final decision and begin the work of ‘editing’ each article to the finished product. The publishers then take over and produce the final proofs, which is what we see in the printed version. Behind the scenes, the Committee of Management under the British Society of Surgery of the Hand (BSSH) and the Federation of Societies of Surgery of the Hand (FESSH), the official parent organizations, support and promote the Journal’s research and social media activities.
Over the years, the personnel involved in these different roles come and go, but the values of excellence and integrity remain as they are passed down from generation to generation, starting from our pioneers. It is perhaps appropriate at this stage to mention the sad passing of one of our pioneers and ex-editor-in-chief Nicholas Barton. A fitting obituary has been written by a team of former Editors-in-Chief in a separate editorial in this issue as they pay tribute to a man who impacted their own lives, and the lives of so many others.
I read all of Nicholas’s editorials before I started my role as Editor-in-Chief. One of his most memorable remarks was in the editorial on ‘Living with deadlines’ (Barton, 1991). In it, he described the stages of a paper and also the making of a Journal, which is a longer and more detailed version of what has been briefly mentioned in this editorial. There are several other gems, however, especially in the section on ‘Good English’, which contains valuable advice that has consistently guided me in my work as an Editor. ‘Good English’, according to Nicholas, is ultimately not confined to those who speak and write English naturally or as their first language, but all about avoiding ambiguity. A native English speaker can write an ambiguous and confusing article, even when there has been an impressive array of vocabulary used and I have handled (and rejected) several of these. On the other hand, some of the best articles in our Journal have been written by ‘non-native’ English speakers; their articles contain a clear message that is easy to follow and provides clarity in the message it wants to tell the world. For non-native English speakers, Nicholas provided this useful advice as he quoted an author: ‘The first advice I got when I had to write a paper in English was “try to write it in English right away and do not start writing the paper in another lanaguage to translate it into English afterwards”’. I agree with this; it is much harder to edit an article that appears to have used tools such as ‘Google Translate’ to convert the text into English and then submitted without further edits, compared to an article that has been originally written in English. The differences are hard to explain, but it is easy to decipher during editing. Notwithstanding some grammatical or phrasing errors in the latter, the meaning is always easier to grasp as the nuances are clearer and not lost in translation.
These words of wisdom from Nicholas, together with those from others before and after him, are passed down in editorials and other articles that we can read and re-read. These pioneers have set the foundation for the making of our Journal over the decades. It is now up to us to continue the work to maintain the highest standards in publishing and research in hand surgery. We would like to thank all our reviewers once again as well as everyone in the team at the Journal for their hard work as we look forward to another year ahead.