Farewell

Abstract

The time has come for me to begin my departure as Editor. I have been in post for fifteen years, since JSR's inception, and the Journal needs a fresh face at the top. I will not be leaving immediately, as the procedure for finding my successor has only just begun, and then there will be a settling-in period for the designated person before a complete hand-over. The process will be smooth, and will be overseen by the ESRS Board working with the Associate Editors. JSR is in a very healthy state. The number of submitted MSS has steadily increased over the years, and for this year we anticipate it will be around 240. Our present acceptance rate for submitted papers, is about 25%. This steady and successful growth means that we may soon become a bimonthly journal, publishing six issues per year. Our switch to electronic submission, a year ago, was not as easy as we had anticipated, and brought many unexpected problems, which I am glad to say are now largely resolved. Prospective authors seem to be attracted to electronic submission systems, but we did have an efficient system to start with and, of course, the ‘human element’ remains fairly constant, whatever the system. Thus our turn-round time of MSS has always been fairly rapid, with good papers being received, reviewed, revised, re-submitted, re-reviewed and accepted, all over a total period averaging 5 months. This is followed by a publication delay averaging another 5 months (despite ours being a quarterly journal), as you will see by examining the relevant details in this and in previous issues. I'd like to mention the important topic of JSR's impact factor. We are a comparatively young journal. Nevertheless, our present impact factor of 3.3 puts us in the top 15% of all science journals worldwide. Our niche has been towards the science of sleep rather than sleep medicine, and perhaps more towards European research. But we have being changing with the times, and you may have noticed by looking at the contents of JSR over the last year or so, that clinical papers now contribute about 40% of all published papers, and about half of all published papers come from outside Europe – mostly from North America. American journals usually have a higher impact rating that their European counterparts, largely because people in the USA are more inclined to cite US journals. Also, a medical journal usually receives more citations than a more science based one. SLEEP is an excellent journal with a higher impact rating than JSR, not only because it comes from the USA, and is more clinical than JSR, but it has been in existence for twice as long as JSR, and publishes clinical guidelines and consensus statements, for example, from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Such publications attract much attention and many citations. As yet, JSR has no such institution to fall back on. Inasmuch that JSR is expanding its number of published papers year by year (mostly by publishing more papers in sleep medicine), expansion does have a temporary but negative result on our impact rating, until the effects filter through. However, I anticipate JSR's impact factor rising to above 4 within the next 2 years. Remember, impact ratings are not all that they seem to be and, for example, a journal that is in a state of collapse, contracting in size, will also see its impact rating rising before its demise! Lastly, I'd like to tell you how much I appreciate the considerable work undertaken by the Associate Editors. They have been so very supportive both to me, personally, and to the Journal, and it is they (and all of you who are reviewers of papers submitted to the Journal), not I, who have made JSR the success it is. Thus, I can report to you that I will be delivering a thriving and healthy journal into the hands of my successor and wish him or her, and the team, every success.