Note from the Editor.

Abstract

Arthroplasty Today debuted in March of 2014 as a quarterly, peer-reviewed, open-access (OA) journal. This December marks the end of our fifth year of publication. Our journal, published by the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons (AAHKS) and Elsevier, places a high priority on rapid publication and seeks to publish a broad range of content while focusing on the case report. Arthroplasty Today manuscripts are indexed in PubMed Central and are currently published four times a year. An easy-to-use app is available for Arthroplasty Today and is particularly helpful for checking out our original, free, and arthroplasty-exclusive–related content online and offline. We are extremely proud of our first 5 years of excellence in serving you. We intend to remain an important part of your education and professional life. This year also marks my last year as the Editor-in-Chief of Arthroplasty Today, and it is time for new leadership. Gregory J. Golladay, MD, Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine and current Deputy Editor, will take over as the Editor-in-Chief in January 2020. Brett R. Levine, MD, MS, Associate Professor of Orthopedics at Rush University Medical Center, will assume the role of Deputy Editor. It has been my great privilege and honor, and in fact one of the highlights of my orthopedic career, to be the founding Editor-in-Chief of Arthroplasty Today. I truly believe that OA publishing represents the future of peer-reviewed scientific communication in general and adult reconstruction specifically. I also maintain that the case report plays a pivotal role in the exchange of ideas in medicine and remains a learning model suited to the trainee and seasoned clinician alike. As AAHKS develops and solidifies its responsibility as the leading agency on hip and knee arthroplasty, Arthroplasty Today will continue to play a crucial position in education and communication throughout our American and international membership. The next 5 years will be critically important ones for Arthroplasty Today. OA publication success depends on a continued culture change within orthopedics, and it will need ongoing support from the AAHKS Board of Directors. Our journal will be building on our newly introduced continuing medical education (CME) model. We will seek further indexing and ultimately an impact factor. We are growing our editorial board and considering changing our publication timetable. At the same time, Arthroplasty Today will need to develop a strategic plan to guide it through the period from 2020 to 2025. For all of these things to happen successfully, Arthroplasty Today will need stable leadership that will be able to guide the journal through these initiatives and beyond. I am confident that Drs. Golladay and Levine will be successful in their new editorial roles. This year, our journal started offering self-assessment CME credits for reading Arthroplasty Today and taking a brief test on our website. One hour of CME credit is earned for reading a selected manuscript (original research or systematic review) and scoring 80% or better on test responses. Our CME software program keeps track of credits and allows members to print a CME transcript. Deputy editor Golladay and Thomas Blumenfeld, MD, associate editor, worked diligently with Sigita Wolfe, AAHKS Director of Education and Research, as well as Denise Smith Rodd, AAHKS Manager of Communications and Web Content, to make this member request a reality and offer educational benefits to our membership and readers. Please see my editorial in this issue regarding our strategy for CME as the journal goes forward. Arthroplasty Today this year petitioned the AAHKS Research Committee through chair Javad Parvizi, MD, FRCS, to make OA publishing fees part of the expected budget when awarding Foundation for Arthroplasty Research and Education grants to support OA publishing. Before Professor Stephen Hawking’s death, he wrote “Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.” The OA movement is working toward this vision, and all manuscripts in Arthroplasty Today are published online with no barriers to access; OA is also an option for authors in our sister journal, the Journal of Arthroplasty. We have recently introduced cascading submissions from the Journal of Arthroplasty. Our journal is diligently working in the OA space to obtain further indexing in addition to PubMed Central, and we are currently working on inclusion in a new index called the Emerging Sources Citation Index. We are working to ultimately obtain an impact factor to allow comparison with other publications. As the world moves closer to universal OA, AAHKS wants to be a leader in the orthopedic community to champion the case for OA. Arthroplasty Today continues to strive for more readership and submissions. At the AAHKS Spring Meeting in New York City this year, deputy editor Golladay gave a summary of our work to date and appealed to international attendees to take advantage of our journal’s offerings. ArthroplastyToday.org has included a “Collections” tab to collate Highlights issues (printed for the fall meeting each year), Office Tips, Surgical Techniques, and TJA in Rare Conditions. The CME tab on the same page makes participation in our self-assessment program readily available. To keep a social media presence, we regularly tweet on our Twitter account @ArthroToday, and the Twitter feed is added to the website. The editors and editorial board continue to personally reach out to arthroplasty surgeons, at home and abroad, to grow our audience. Finally, we have rounded out our manuscript offerings by introducing “Viewpoint” (see September editorial)—a narrative submission that presents the opinion of a member or members of the arthroplasty community where intriguing, stimulating, controversial, or insightful ideas are presented. This year, Arthroplasty Today wanted to explore how cutting-edge digital health tools are being applied in the care of patients undergoing arthroplasty by soliciting and publishing manuscripts that highlight the use of digital technology in our field. We collaborated with the AAHKS Digital Health, Technology and Social Media committee to highlight “digital orthopedics” in the March edition of Arthroplasty Today. We wanted our publication to follow the very successful Digital Orthopedics Conference San Francisco, which seeks to “bridge the worlds of digital health and clinical orthopedics and thereby catalyze the adoption of technology in musculoskeletal care.” This conference, founded in 2017 and chaired by Arthroplasty Today Associate Editor, Stefano A. Bini, MD, is an example of a pioneering idea brought to fruition by a leader in AAHKS. Arthroplasty Today is the official journal of the American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR). In the June issue, we published a white paper from AJRR outlining the challenges and policies of procedure coding in the AJRR, entitled “Procedure coding in the American Joint Replacement Registry” by Cahue et al. In this December issue, we again publish an Executive Summary of the 2019 AJRR Annual Report with a link to the full text of the report on the Arthroplasty Today home page. Now, I would like to thank all of those who have helped Arthroplasty Today succeed this year and since its beginning. First, I would like to thank all of our contributors for considering our journal. A research journal is of course only as good as its content. I would also like to show appreciation to all our reviewers for their excellent and timely evaluations this year as Arthroplasty Today centers on their hard work. We have published the names of our Editorial Board and reviewers in recognition of their invaluable contribution in our “Highlights” print edition as well as our December publication. I would also like to offer a personal note of thanks to AAHKS President Michael P. Bolognesi, MD, the AAHKS Board of Directors, AAHKS Publications Committee Chair, Samuel S. Wellman, MD, and the AAHKS Publications Committee. The success and progress of our journal would not be possible without this team effort, and my own journey as editor would have been nearly as rewarding without our outstanding leadership team. Arthroplasty Today peer-review editor Taylor Bowen continues to be the backbone of our peer review process and editorial management. AAHKS Executive Director Michael J. Zarski, JD, has offered unwavering support for Arthroplasty Today and for my role as Editor-in-Chief since our inception. Elsevier Executive Publisher Ginny Pittman has helped tremendously in fine-tuning our publication process and offered strong publishing leadership since joining us this year. Kathey Alexander, a consultant in professional and scholarly publishing, continues to offer sage and timely advice as our journal grows. Elsevier Journal Managers Sara Miller and Linsey Burbery, Sales Director Nicole Johnson, AAHKS journals Advertising Sales Manager Michael Perlowitz, and Marketing Communications Manager Nicholas Buldo continue to support and strengthen our journal. A truly extraordinary editorial staff has made the success of Arthroplasty Today possible, and I am indebted to each of them for the professionalism, expertise, and dedication they have shown for our journal and organization over the years. Deputy Editor Gregory J. Golladay, MD, and Associate Editors Stefano A. Bini, MD, Thomas J. Blumenfeld, MD, Mark J. Spangehl, MD, and Bryan D. Springer, MD, have supported me unconditionally and developed this journal as a team, and for that, I will be forever grateful. Penultimately, I would like to recognize with very special thanks AAHKS Publications Liaison Denise Smith Rodd. Ms. Rodd’s professional support has been an integral part of my ability to edit Arthroplasty Today in addition to my responsibilities as a clinician. I am so grateful for her can-do attitude, editorial expertise, management skills, and professionalism. Finally, I want to extend an immense thank you to our readers. In this era of constant competition for attention, choosing to read a new journal is not easy. Our audience has grown tremendously over the last 5 years, and in 2018 and the first 6 months of 2019, Arthroplasty Today has had 266,909 downloads from our website. Our manuscripts are being cited regularly in other journals and at meeting presentations worldwide; journal citations have tripled this year alone. Our journal cannot be successful without wide and engaged readership, and our mission is to grow the successes that we have enjoyed so far by offering quality manuscripts that positively impact clinical practice in an online OA format. 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