Time to publication

When I assumed the responsibility for assigning manuscripts to reviewers in June 2010, there were 268 articles waiting to be published. The amount of time from acceptance of a manuscript to its publication averaged about 23 months. I am pleased and proud to report that, for this January 2012 issue, we have reduced the average time from acceptance to publication to 6.8 months. How could this change have come about so quickly?

Former editor David Turpin instituted the “online only” format in 2006. By 2010, he was publishing 4 to 6 online only articles each month. I wrote to many of the authors who had been waiting patiently for their articles to be published, and I offered them the possibility of early publication in the online only format. Over 80% accepted this option.

So, from January to December 2011, we were able to publish nearly 100 articles in online only format, with their abstracts appearing in the printed version of the journal. This step, along with a rather healthy rejection rate of about 75%, has allowed us to substantially reduce the time to publication. In the future, we’ll use the online only option to keep our time from acceptance to publication at 6 to 8 months. This is great news for future authors who submit their manuscripts to the AJO-DO .

Impact factor

In June 2011, the Journal Citation Reports published the journal impact factors for the top 74 dental journals. A journal’s impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which an average article in that journal has been cited in a particular year or period. I am pleased to report that our 5-year impact factor of 1.924 places the AJO-DO first among the 6 orthodontic journals. In addition, the AJO-DO received 8455 citations in 2010, by far the most for any orthodontic journal. In fact, the AJO-DO is the number 6 journal among all dental journals according to total citations received. For perspective, the total citations in 2010 for the other 5 orthodontic journals combined was 7154. The key to maintaining a high impact factor is to accept manuscripts that provide the best scientific information on topics with the greatest clinical relevance.