Oh God; what ABSOLUTE FUCKING LAZINESS. Nothing on survivors or rehab or 100% recovery. WHY THE HELL IS STROKE IN YOUR NAME ANYWAY?
What is your impact factor in getting survivors recovered?
And Dr. Sacco was former president of the American Heart Association.
Achievements and New Initiatives for Stroke in 2021
Although we started the year celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stroke, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) brought many new challenges that changed all of our lives. As we start a new year, we are all hoping that 2021 brings better times and a new normal. I am confident that more advanced treatments and vaccines for COVID-19 will become available, and enlightened leadership will help guide us toward better implementation of preventive measures. I also hope for improved initiatives to address racial inequality, improve equity, diversity and inclusion, and enhance health equity. We will also strive to advance the American Heart Association (AHA) mission to be champions for health equity and advance cardiovascular health for all, including identifying and removing barriers to health care access and quality.
See related article, p 8
As 2021 begins, I am happy to report on some notable achievements over the last few months. First, I want to thank the amazing editorial board and the over 1600 reviewers from 66 countries who help us maintain the high-quality of our publications. I am also very proud of the progress we have made in improving equity and diversity on our Stroke editorial masthead. We now include 294 people with 47% women (up from 29% in 2019), 43% international, 21% Asians, 5% Hispanic (up from 3%) and 5% Black participants (up from 1%). Without all of these hard-working and dedicated members of our editorial board, we would not be where we are today.
We have other plans to continue to be more inclusive and call upon more diverse individuals to author, review, and engage in the leadership of the journal. To achieve our goals, we will continue to support our trainee reviewer program to provide clinical and translational science trainees the opportunity to learn how to be a good reviewer, perform peer reviews, and receive some constructive feedback. We also plan to launch a new intensive Editor-in-Training program for a selected group of under-represented people in medicine. Our goal is to build a broader pipeline of future editorial board leaders by providing a mentored editorial experience with our associate editor team.
Other approaches to address inequity in our editorial process include the following: (1) collecting better demographic data in eJournal Press, our article submission system; (2) utilizing this information to enhance reviewer selection and increase use of under-represented racial and ethnic groups in peer review; (3) requesting that section editors include women and diverse authors when nominations are made soliciting invited content; and (4) encouraging all board members and senior editors to act as ambassadors at meetings to identify and recruit diverse individuals to the journal.
I also wanted to share some other good news. In July 2020, we were notified about a rise in our 2-year impact factor to 7.190 (from 6.046) and 5-year impact factor of 7.113 (from 6.572). We remain ranked No. 1 among stroke journals, No. 6 out of 65 for peripheral vascular disease journals, No. 16 out of 1204 clinical neurology journals, and No. 4 out the 12 AHA journals. Our new team cannot really claim any of the credit. The hard work of the many editorial members over the last few years need to be recognized and congratulated.
We also have ended the year with a record number of submissions to the journal on track to have over 4100 articles submitted to Stroke with a 18% increase in original article submissions and 33% increase in other types of articles over the last year. We received many reports about COVID-19 that we expedited in the early months of the pandemic and were collated by the AHA coronavirus resource site. Unfortunately, with the increased number of submissions, we are only able to publish 12% of original articles.
As many of you have heard by now, a new open-access journal, Stroke: Vascular and Interventional Neurology will be launched in July 2021. This will be a first in many ways since it is a joint collaboration and ownership between the AHA and the Society of Vascular and Interventional Neurology. While Stroke will continue to evaluate and publish interventional articles, we will also be able to refer many high-quality articles to this journal just as we currently do with other AHA journals such as Journal of the American Heart Association.
I am also happy to announce that for the first time one of our own, Hooman Kamel, a vascular neurologist at Cornell Weill Medical Center, has been named as one of the 2020 Joseph A. Vita award recipients for his contributions to cardiovascular health and to the AHA journals. Selections for this prestigious award are made by the AHA Scientific Publishing committee based on nominations from all journal editors.
With this January 2021 issue, we also are launching a few new initiatives. The Advances in Stroke articles will provide brief summaries of some hot topics and breaking news in specific disciplines authored by our section editors each month. Rather than try to cram these all into one issue, we are planning to provide specific Advances each month and summarize the prior calendar year. This month you can find Advances in Stroke for Treatments–Recovery and a new section on Digital Health.
Page limits are a limiting factor for the number of articles we can publish in-print or online each year. We have expanded our brief article type labeled Research Letters and encourage authors to use this opportunity to update others about advances in the field. These brief 750-word articles with only 1 figure and no abstract are very focused and meant to make an important innovative point in any topic areas covered by Stroke.
We are also making a major change in how we handle Letters to the Editor. As it turns out, our Letters take up a sizable number of pages and accounted for 182 ePages in 2020. The AHA journals have a new online process for remarks on published articles that has been working for Circulation and other journals that has now launched for Stroke. This system allows our readers to write letters about published articles, have them reviewed by our editorial board, and have our authors provide a response. All letters to the editor will track with the online contents of the article and allow us to print other articles with the saved pages. We still have a backlog of letters to the editor that will be appearing the old way, but I hope our readers will find this new system more efficient for following important scientific discussions about our published articles.
We live in a much more enlightened digital age and they say a picture paints a thousand words. We have had graphic abstracts for some time for our translational science articles and started encouraging them for our clinical and population science submissions. Starting in January, we are now asking all authors of our original research articles to create a visual abstract that we will feature online as a way to succinctly summarize the key points of the article. We promise to disseminate these more widely through social media to more effectively spread science to our readers. We also are enhancing our social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit and have continued to expand our blogging editors. We are also planning to initiate Stroke Podcasts very soon.
We have increased the word limits for our review articles and engaged our increased number of section editors to solicit state of the art reviews across our many topic areas. We will continue to collect some multi-article reviews in our Focused Updates in Cerebrovascular Disease. In November, we were able to publish our Focused Update in Health Equity, and we have other great topics planned in 2021.
We have also increased the number of solicited editorials to comment on our publications and place them in perspective. Moreover, we are changing the format of our Table of Contents in-print and online to mirror that of Circulation and some other AHA journals. You will now find the editorial will be placed just after the published article to allow the reader to quickly evaluate the source article and the perspectives of the editorial authors.
Other strategic goals include an increase in the number of timely simultaneous publications with our scientific meetings, attracting more publications of clinical trial results, and continuing to be dedicated to training early career professionals. To advance the next generation of editorial board members, we are maintaining our trainee assistant reviewer program. We also have expanded the number of our trainees and fellows engaged as bloggers to help spread the word about articles and trending topics in our field. We will continue to solicit special articles for our International Stroke Early Career and Training section.
All in all, we continue to do everything we can to advance the Stroke mission and achieve our vision. Our mission is to drive innovative interdisciplinary research, transform patient care, and enhance our understanding of disorders of the cerebral circulation and our vision is to be an indispensable, inspiring, and trusted source of high-quality scientific knowledge for all stroke disciplines. Thanks for all of your help throughout a challenging 2020, and we look forward to success and progress in 2021.
Disclosures
Dr Sacco receives compensation from the AHA as Editor-in-Chief of Stroke.
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