Fire away. And am I live? Yes, you're live. So, welcome everybody. This is, I'm giving my final, oh come on now, I'm giving my final reviewer session here for the journal. Doing it from home. Hopefully the dog won't bark too much and if so I'll ask my dog to, actually I'll go in the other room. You'll see my background changing because I don't know how long my dog will bark. He was quiet until now. But anyhow, I just, this is my swan song here. At the end I'm going to have Charlie Saltzman come on. He'll be the new editor-in-chief speaking a bit about his plans for the journal. But this is really just kind of run through the usual statistics for probably most of you have been on these reviewer sessions before. First time we've ever done it virtually. These COVID times are very, very strange times. But I wish I could see all in person because normally the one thing you all get in compensation for reviewing articles is the free cocktails and appetizers in the back of the room. And then we could have had a beer or glass of wine together to thank you again for all your hard work. But instead I'll just have to thank you virtually and hopefully next year in Vancouver we'll be meeting. But by then Charlie would have been done doing it for a year. So yes, this just, I just want to run through the statistics. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time. We'll give Charlie some time to talk about things also. This has been an incredibly busy year. Before I get to that again, one of my main goals for my main folks here is just to thank all of you. Some people have had beyond the reviewers roles, they've been part of the editorial board. All the names you can see here, they've just been all great, have been my right hand people providing editorial input when necessary, when there's disputed manuscripts, just providing overall editorial guidance. We had some issues with authorship on certain papers and they've just been incredibly helpful throughout these years. And I've been doing this now as of September 1st, it'll be 13 years that I've done this editor-in-chief. The maximum should have been 11 but oddly enough there was a, I think it's when my first contract for five years ran out. The AOFA's bylaws say you can have two three-year extensions. I'm not exactly sure why they wrote this in the AOFA's bylaws, probably to prevent people like me from doing it too long. But I actually worked two years without a contract unbeknownst to me or the society and then when they renewed it I got the two three-year extension. So I served longer than I was supposed to but anyhow it's been a great ride and I thank all of you. We also have a group of associates and these are my group people that when I had articles that had split decisions would help out with decision making and all again have just served an invaluable role in that because some of these it's not entirely clear whether we should accept the articles or not and I don't necessarily want to be a dictator even though ultimately it's the editor-in-chief's decision but they provide some extremely useful input over the these last 13 years. Then we also have some section editors who've helped out with various things as you can see here and again I want to name everybody but you can see that what these different people have helped out with over the years and again these have been very very helpful for these various areas and keeping that area content relevant for the journal all these years. We also have some new addition the electronic media board now what they do is what I don't do. So you got these twitter things and all these intelligent things are happening with the journal not the old school things which is I'm the old school guy we got these young smart tech savvy social media savvy people have been helping out and I appreciate all the help that this group has given. Now what about the usual things I like to run through on these meetings this has just been a bizarre year in many ways but especially for us as physicians it's been all about COVID. I think probably every single one of us clinically has been affected by this and for two and a half months you know I didn't do any surgery like I'm sure many of you for two months I'm an employed physician at a hospital and I wasn't even allowed to see patients. Now a lot of people during that time either had I think projects in the works and they hadn't finished them or they said I got to do something with this time so they did review papers etc. So last year you'll see on a subsequent slide we had like 850 submissions and as of now I think it was today sheriff pulled up these numbers for me we've already had 803 new submissions so far this year last year we had 850 and when I was looking at our managerial board minutes last week we held a virtual managerial board meeting in March the third week of March and one of my concerns at that time is submissions were still down we had to lower the number submissions so for the first two and a half months a year we had a lower than average number of submissions and now we've skyrocketed and if we only had 50 submissions for each month which were certainly trending way higher than that currently we'll be over a thousand manuscript submissions for the year so it has been a banner year so that's why it's not your imagination I've been asking all of you more frequently to do reviews everybody's been great about accepting them or not accepting them and it's led to no change at all despite this massive increase. Sheriff's kept on top of it and you all have kept on top of it and it's made a huge difference for the number of manuscripts now the other thing it's led to a little bit more of a backlog fortunately nowadays our papers are posted online usually within about a month and I'll show you the exact statistics soon but that makes it so that you know if your paper is not in the print journal for five months or six months well it's been available before that so people have access to it whether it be to be able to cite it or for promotions etc now you can see here we actually did have 950 submissions in 2018 at the rate we're going if we kept up at 100 submissions we'll be up at 1200 for this year and I don't know I kind of I'm anticipating the number of submissions will probably actually start to trend downward and might actually be a little bit low for a few months just because everybody will have gotten all their pending projects done that may not be the case maybe a lot of these things were things people weren't going to do otherwise but again it's been incredibly busy because this is we're not even through August yet we're already over 800 submissions for the the year and they run the usual gamut of papers you can see that you know there's the same mix we get far fewer case reports than we well typically we get fewer the acceptance rate on case reports is very low just because there's not a lot to be you know you can see we've yeah you know you can see we have very very few I'm sorry I can't see around my picture on the screen with the rest of us manuscript acceptance rate actually keeps dropping you know we've been trending down and this year despite the massive increase we're staying at about 20 percent overall manuscript acceptance rate that means doesn't mean that we're getting poor quality manuscripts it just means we're publishing better quality papers which is great for a journal especially since we have FAO as an alternative to us now to cascade articles too and we'll look at the those numbers have gone up a lot also so you can just see the ratio here and these just the numbers so far this year now as far as public manuscripts published probably will be up a little bit compared to last year just because I don't want to get too big a backlog between the time from acceptance the time of the print journal but again I don't want to make that too short I think it's it's going to be good let it float up for a couple months till Charlie takes over and once he can see that if that trend is staying up there then not worry about maybe publishing a few more papers and getting that time down a little bit I have for whatever reason settled on about five months for the time from acceptance to being the print journal at the beginning of this year now it's probably going to currently be about seven months depending upon the type of the paper when I first took over the manuscript submission rate except the delay time is about nine months for an original manuscript and about 12 months for a case report now despite the increase all this massive increase in numbers because you all are getting your reviews into the same amount of time or even faster because I guess we had nothing else to do during COVID and Sheriff's kept on top of it and you see that we did not bump up at all you know in fact our numbers to this year to date are one day shorter on the first time the first decision in the whole week faster than the time to final decision so again I thank you all for for getting your reviews in a timely fashion or just saying hey I can't do this thing this review in a timely fashion all those things make a difference keep the review time down which makes our authors want to submit their work to us because they're not waiting you know for six months for a decision to be made on their paper so typically actually last year if you look we were down to about three weeks on average last year for the time from acceptance to online publication posting once we submit the copyedited article to SAGE the only reason why it's gone up a little bit this year from 21 to 27 days is just because there were some COVID related things with the typesetting and I the numbers are getting back down where they belong I suspect there'll be 21 days again soon just because I think that little blip during the during the COVID time with the the time the delay with the copy typesetting is over now this is just a breakdown you know where who are the top five countries submitting articles you can see here we get a huge number from China but as is oftentimes the case the overall quality this is not a bi-american journal this is an international journal but the decisions on whether accept a paper or not we're all predicated on the scientific validity of the article so we just from the United States we tend to submit better quality articles and this has actually been stable for probably upwards of five years pretty much every year we look at the the breakdown and this is just year to date for 2020 but if you look at 2019-18 etc for about the last five years submitted it's about two-thirds international one-third U.S. papers and yet we're basically about a 50-50 breakdown a little bit more U.S. acceptance because on average the U.S. papers are of higher quality and therefore we have uh you know a higher percentage acceptance of the U.S. papers now the other thing is we continue to have a very very uh active um online uh use to the journal we just have I mean look we have the article you know comparing plantar fasciitis injected with platelets plasma versus steroids there are 5400 downloads so far this year keep in mind FAI you you've got to have a subscription to download this you got to pay for it in contrast to FAO so this is just a huge volume and if you look at the the bar graph month to month you know with 2020 being the dark blue you can see that we just continue to get higher and higher and that huge bump back in January that was that was pre-COVID so these are just the natural numbers of the fact that our journal is getting more and more online usage and therefore more and more views and therefore should be quoted more and just to get its reflection of the the relevance of our journal um this is something Charlie uh kind of spearheaded a few years ago um starting in 2017 pretty much any uh article that has a surgical technique described um we request a technique video and obviously not all of them do one but probably ballpark a third of the time we ask for somebody to submit a technique video they they submit one which number one makes a lot easier makes a lot easier for the reader if they are especially if they're online just to click the video link to see how they did it it's it's obviously easier to see something being done rather than looking at pictures and reading the the you know legend for the figures but it's also it's a nice um you know thing to have available especially for residents and fellows if they're wondering well how you do this operation instead of having to search for it they can see it's right there it's in living color in the actual uh article they've just read podcasts never cease to amaze me um i really didn't think this was that necessary thing and yet they're immensely popular you can see that every year it's just growing by leaps and bounds and this year i suspect will be a ballpark last year's numbers interestingly the number of views podcast downloads has not necessarily gone up dramatically compared to last year despite covet and here you can see when you look at the far left column you know we have more than 2 000 downloads for a lot of these um podcasts and people listen in the car listen to them when they're exercising and uh it's pretty remarkable so it's a great thing and um i'm sure charlie will want to keep that uh going forward our impact factor this year was flat i was a little disappointed i'd hope to see it go up it's basically at 2.3 again but uh more important though is when you look at us the top red line compared to all the rest of the ankle journals you know we are and have always been you know the top foot and ankle journal and that's that's the key is we just we want to be the best the foot and ankle journals and ideally would love to see the journal impact factor go up to you know 80 or whatever it is that science is out but but the key is we our goal is to be the most relevant foot and ankle journal and uh you can see that we we always have been and we're we're staying above our uh competition so to speak um we had a slight drop this year in our overall ranking of all orthopedic journals uh but not really i mean we went from 29 to 31 but then again there were you know six more journals being published orthopedic journals being published this year but again we're still very very high interestingly you know what does the impact factor comes from it comes from the articles the number of articles published in 2017-18 two years prior to the current year and then the number of time those articles were cited and so charlie being the senior author on the the most you know reference paper it was on weight-bearing ct but then in review articles tend to get cited a lot and yet the very next most quoted paper was a scientific paper on brostroms augmented with internal brace so i'm always kind of surprised that what i think is going to be a great article sometimes is not quoted as much and sometimes they are but charlie may want to drill down further into this and see if he can figure out the the gold gold pot of gold to get us up to that science and science level of journal impact factor um now new for this year you all can get cme which is great because you're doing the work and you might as well this is this is a real benefit because we typically pay for our cme you do actually have to click on this link when you get the decision letter about the paper uh and the email um it's not an automatic thing but keep in mind you can get if you're doing five reviews per year which hopefully are you're getting 15 cme credits per year and it's it's it's easy it's free and you deserve it it's it's not a you know because you're spending time and you're learning at the same time so i think it's it's a great benefit and but just please do make sure you look for that link to claim your credit for each of the articles my suspicion is if you haven't done it i'm guessing there's a way for us to do it manually any of you who have not been doing this let us know so we can figure out a way so you get your credit for the reviews that you've already done so far this year and this is something that's been for a while nih funded manuscripts sage has agreed to waive the immediate fee so there is a fee for non-nih funded papers if somebody wants their paper freely except available to everybody there's actually a three thousand dollar fee it's basically it's an article publishing fee because then they don't then people don't need a subscription to be able to access that that article like for instance fao the online only journals but for NIH funded papers we waive that automatically i authenticate never cease to amaze me there are people predominantly actually this year i think all of them have international submissions it's hard to write in a foreign language so they'll just copy and paste in sometimes whole paragraphs amount of papers and that is even if it's their own paper that's not that's self-plagiarism it's not it's not legitimate many of these are papers that they have duplication or plagiarism but then they're also not they're not a good article anyhow so those i'll just reject them if they have duplication or plagiarism in them we don't automatically reject it because they didn't actually publish plagiarized work i'll just send them a form letter saying you have to change this and then once they change it then we'll probably send it out for review because it doesn't count against them so long as they change it there's still the cme exams available 2019 cme exams available for those of you need your scored self-assessment for your mock credit for the abos it's a very easy way to get it altmetrics see that's the benefit of being with a savvy journal tech savvy journal like sage they have all this stuff altmetrics is looking at more stuff on social media but this is a different way the papers get a lot of attention and it has to do with social media sites news outlets the video uploads and they come up with these scores and it does reflect a lot of activity so it's probably more relevant for you know for you know promoting yourself as a physician or your department or something like that but it's something that sage gets for us there's also kudos which allows our authors to promote their work i honestly don't know how this works if you want you can send an email and we'll send you more information than this but it's a free free service to get your your papers published publicized more and probably lead to more citation and more scientific recognition for the work you're doing now fao um as of last year i took over editing both these two journals just try to dovetail these things to kind of mesh them together better for the new editor-in-chief took over so i also uh an editor for this uh when i took over i didn't want to change the editorial board you can see we have an international editorial board which is uh important for getting your journal index so we have uh our international members you know tim daniels and andrew goldberg bjot henchman young cooley uh shiyan lee is no longer international she's american um so and terry saks be from australia so we have a whole group which is important we still have our various section editors for the different um parts this may change with charlie going forward since we've published a lot of review articles now but the initial 20 that we're aiming for are done so i'm not exactly sure there may be some changes forthcoming and that'll be charlie's decision on that now here's something i'm actually quite pleased about we have a lot more manuscripts coming to us at fal and probably rather than looking at the total number received it's probably better to look um at the breakdown of where are these coming from so you can see for instance in 2019 or 2018 when we offered the cascade our options so a paper wasn't good enough quite good enough to be accepted by fai we'd offer the authors the option you know do you want to cascade your article over you can see that we had a pretty low rate of uh choosing to do that which is pretty typical for an online journal once coming you know into fruition but you can see that we offered 126 option of options that last year and with 22 accepted so we're kind of we're hitting like one and six and this year uh we're approaching a third of people that we offer them have accepted um ours and a lot of these are actually really good articles they just weren't quite maybe they didn't have quite enough subjects or maybe the topic had been looked at once before but it's still new information but maybe not quite enough and they're we're getting some really uh great um articles there and a lot more acceptance um now you can see for instance uh you know a lot of um clinical research articles case reports you know we accepted three of them but still we're not accepting all of them it's not fao is not a repository for case reports um it's a place for original research it's not quite you know the fai standards the interesting thing is i'm not quite sure you remember the the bar the pie chart i showed you on fai where it's you know 50 50 publication versus you know domestic versus international for the publication but submitted it's two-thirds very few of the international submissions when we offer them the option do they accept it there's a few of them but the vast majority are united states and i don't know if it's the 650 article processing fee for aofs members and a thousand dollars if you're not a member but if you're an international member you still get the 650 apcs so i'm not exactly sure what the difference is but um fao currently is primarily a us journal but you can see we're getting up there and keep in mind in 2019 of that 47 some of those were were solicited review articles whereas this year i think every single well maybe all but one of these um were uh articles that people either submitted directly to fao or cascaded over so we're getting a lot more just true scientific papers and people choosing to submit their work and publish their work with us um whoops wrong way and you can see therefore our content is up except last year a lot of the those pages were actually uh article abstracts from our meetings so the page count is actually not that accurate far more important is the number of articles we're publishing you can see again that they're they're still getting a fair amount of traction for somebody so this is you know review article on use for abrasive orthotics and then also evaluation treatment diabetic foot ulcers so these are they're getting their main hits on the review articles which is a it's typically where you get the most citations that's what drives up your journal impact factor too until we get um index which will hopefully be within the next year that we're going to be starting to be considered for journal impact factor but when we get it then everything will be uh the indexing will all be retroactive so anybody publishing a paper with us they will all be indexed eventually and you can see we continue to just have increasing um volume of the the downloads by the year so again fao as expected is gaining traction and the other thing that i'm really pleased about is you all are getting your reviews done we've changed some of the editorial uh review process so our initial reviews unfortunately were pretty long initially and now we're we're down 21 days so we actually are now matching fai's time to first decision our final decision time is a little bit longer but basically these are all now within industry standards where previously we were it was long and that was part of the reason i got some feedback from some authors that they were reluctant to submit to fao because our decision time was too long and now we're right there right where we belong so people don't mind accepting that cascade you know thinking well it's going to be you know a long time before i get a decision on my paper so it's really and again this is a tribute to all you you know accepting the reviews if you can do them and getting them done in a timely fashion if you can't do it then just say sorry i can't do it the time to publication this again this i anticipate will be down below 30 days it'll probably be 21 days as soon as the covet related issues are sorted out that's the only real issue so far this year previously it was a little bit higher just because there's a little bit back and forth between the authors and the typesetters that i've eliminated so pretty much once a paper gets typeset the first time that's that's it you know there might be a query or two for the author but there's not a lot of back and forth between those so it's led to a huge improvement in our review cycle time and i think that's just hugely beneficial and again the alt metrics you can see they do it for fao also you can see that this ankle fracture including post-traumatic fragment review again it's got the highest alt metrics so this is our cascade option and it's getting a lot more attention i think it's only going to grow in the future and who knows eventually fao will be that same thing not until we can make up in advertising what we charge for subscription which is not in the near future i can assure you that now keep in mind though when you're reviewing for fao or even fai that sometimes i'm going to be sending out articles for review they're coming from fai because that's where they were submitted to but feel free to say not good enough send it to fao because just because i'm sending an article to review that's coming from fai it's i don't they didn't submit it originally to fao it's totally fine to say you know reject but recommend cascade option because there's it's just easier to do it this way to keep the whole process seamless so you have that option to click when you're doing reviews just click not good enough but recommend cascade option um now in contrast to fi we don't have a limit on the page number for fao because the cost of creating the article is what they pay for the article processing fee but we're looking for the b paper not the c to f paper so to speak fai we want the a and a minus papers the b papers go to fao but if it's still not a good paper and it comes to you for instance through the fao portal then feel free to say don't accept it or certainly if it's got scientific you know validity problems then just say no don't just get it's coming from fao or even if it's cascade don't feel like you have to say accept the paper still use your judgment but it just doesn't have to be quite as high bar as we set for fai so the bottom line is i just want to thank you again all of you some of you have been on a review panel for the whole 13 years that i've been the editor-in-chief i greatly greatly greatly appreciate all the work you've done you all are the ones that are the gatekeepers that have maintained this as the premier foot and ankle journal in the world and i just really appreciate that so i'm going to stop there um charlie um and i don't know i think there's a there might be a chat function somewhere where you all can um ask any questions that you have um well it looks like there's two and then i also want charlie because charlie's taking over here uh yeah naomi asked me where uh she said thanks for all i've done where's her wine yeah uh checks in the mail now anyhow um charlie you want to say a few words because you're taking over here this is your baby you're going forward first and most importantly today is to thank dave for 13 years of remarkable service i started out as a ken johnson fellow so i saw ken edit the journal and then became pretty close to hapluder and greer richardson and then dave took over and i can say without any question dave has made this better and better and better you could hear today's presentation and understand all the dimensionalities that of the journal now that did not exist before the high quality of the journal the focus on clinical medicine and his commitment which has been unwavering he's had 13 years looking for a wi-fi access every single day for the whole time 13 years in a row and you know if you if you imagine if you were me you'd be pretty humbled like i am taking over at this point and hoping that you can you can keep it going and keep the trajectory um in the same general direction um i i'm hoping all of the reviewers will stay with us and will continue to help make this as good a journal as possible or good as journals as possible it's really important to the field the reason i applied for the job and want to do the job is that i actually think this work that we do is the most important work that can be done to raise the level of discourse and quality of care worldwide and the reviewer the reviewers are critical to that we need to be very friendly to authors we need to be good reviewers and friendly to reviewers and we need to be thinking about what readers want to see and what's really relevant to them and you've done a great job with that i'm just hoping i can i can follow um and and do a job that will make us all happy so i i look at my role as a really a servant to the journal a servant to the field um and servant to you to to help make this uh world that we're in better and better um we need to celebrate dave uh next year hopefully in in vancouver we can all get together and naomi can get her wine and um and i can get mine and we can really celebrate this most remarkable tenure of a great leader for the journal um i don't have any preconceived notions of changing much uh the main thing i need to change is get out of being chair of orthopedics of utah which i'm working very hard to do and hope to get it done soon so that i can really have time to to do everything else which is clinical care and and taking care of the journal but the journal will be my primary focus and on behalf of all the reviewers dave thank you for an amazing run thank you for doing it thank you for being who you are which is a person who is uh unflappable uh completely straightforward um very um committed and also um always elevating what we can do thank you so much um and thank you sheriff for everything you are doing and hopefully you'll continue helping uh the journal as we as we go into this new era and i'm we'll make some mistakes guys and let me know when when i've made a mistake because it's gonna i'll stumble for sure as we get this thing started and hopefully moving forward well try thanks thanks those kind words i mean the bottom line is you are eminently qualified to do this and uh i'm certainly happy to help in any way shape or form you're wondering the transition from me to you taking over and of course the the one time so share and i see each other twice a year it's not we don't even talk to each other on the phone it's all these countless emails but share has been invaluable i'm sure any of you it's like you send me an email it's like well i don't know my my review didn't go on something's wrong and she always gets to it within a half hour she has been outstanding um charlie you're lucky to have her um when i started we were published by a different publisher i had a different editorial assistant and there were let's just say there are some issues which you won't go into and then my when we transitioned to sage that's when elaine layton who's now our executive director of the entire foot and ank society took over i remember when when we're switching from elaine to shara i didn't know share i'm thinking oh my god elaine is amazing all of you have interacted with her as the executive director for the foot next side you know that and i get this share and i knew her name so i'd seen it before and emails about the foot next side and you've just been outstanding and i appreciate it notice you see how so i make these decisions you all make your decision in the paper but notice she's doing all this grunt work and every single one of these and when these papers don't get submitted properly after resubmitted 12 times she's the one doing that and despite that our review cycle time didn't even it went down a day for this year it went down a month it went down a week for the final time to final decision so that's all i'm sure i really appreciate all your hard work and uh i wish i was seeing you in person so i could buy you a glass of wine or something but thank you very much for all your uh all your help it's been great working with you and i look forward to what's to come you too and i see all these comments thanks everyone sent me specific thanks and um i appreciate it and i we will eventually see each other again i think uh someday they'll either be covet under control or a functional vaccine although i'm not going to take that russian one because i'm i'm guessing it's recycled plutonium but we'll get one in the us before but anyhow but yeah thanks again everyone charlie do you have anything else you want to finish with i think we're good no just thank you all right we're good well thanks again and hopefully i'll see you all in uh vancouver thanks good night good night good night

journal

virtual

COVID-19 pandemic

statistics

online usage

podcasts

editor-in-chief