Editorial

Abstract

In my last Editorial, I wrote about the strong participation of African research in the Joint Meeting held by the British Ecological Society Tropical Ecology Group and the Society for Tropical Ecology in Edinburgh this April. This next quarter of the year will see the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation hold its annual meeting in Madagascar, providing a further opportunity for African researchers to present their work, both to each other and to the global research community. I hope that we will eventually publish some of the research presented at this prestigious meeting. It is very encouraging to see a steadily increasing participation of African ecologists and conservation scientists on the world stage and reminds me of the important role this journal plays in developing science and successful scientific careers on this continent. In June, this year our publisher, Wiley, released performance reports showing how their journals are performing in conveying research results to the scientific community and general public. The impact factor of the African Journal of Ecology has risen slightly this year, showing that in general our newly published papers are being more widely read than they previously were. The increasing regularity and calibre of scientific conferences and exchanges in Africa will surely boost further increases in the impacts of papers and a broader readership, but I hope that the Journal will remain a first choice for scientists wishing to publish their work to an audience on the continent, for whom the results are often most relevant. Our contributing authors are in the vast majority from African institutions, something which marks out the important role this journal plays, as this is the only peer-reviewed scientific publication that has this author profile. The annual figures also show that our recent Special Section on Camera Trapping was very well received, with twelve of the top twenty most downloaded papers coming from that issue. This is doubly impressive as the issue has only been in circulation 8 months, compared against papers available for up to a year. This Special Section was carefully structured to contain thorough reviews of various aspects of the emerging field and pair them with original research papers that illustrated the points in the review. The keen uptake encourages me to believe that this format is a good one for our Journal community. I will try to provide further Special issues on the topics most relevant to African ecology today. I trust you will enjoy them. A final reflection also comes from reviewing the performances of our various paper formats. Since revising our short format guidelines last year, we have seen many of our Notes and Records, and Short Communications achieving high readerships. Unexpected field observations which confirm a previously tentative hypothesis; pilot studies that show novel results; sightings of rare species; or new records that change distributions can all be turning points in our understanding of ecosystems. They are likely to be of particular importance as we grapple with the rapid ecological changes likely to occur this century. Elegant, focussed papers with clear messages are the building blocks of bigger pictures. Our short papers are achieving more than you might think. From their performance to date, I would certainly encourage future authors to consider these formats more. Use them to publish those precious observations that may otherwise never get farther than your field notebook. Your one record may just be the one that changes everything—if you get it out there! Our bigger pictures of ecosystems will be all the better if they are built on as much detail as the research community can provide. You can look forward to reading some excellent short papers in this issue, and I hope they will inspire you to try these formats as a reader and as an author.