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Pleasing and displeasing things

At the approximate halfway mark of my 5-year term at the helm of Liver International, I thought it might be instructive and interesting to run through a list of things I find pleasing and displeasing. Being the chief editor of a journal such as Liver International is often time-consuming, occasionally edifying, rarely frustrating, but almost always interesting. So I should state first that the pleasures outweigh the displeasures. So let’s start with the good news. Manuscripts: submissions continue to increase in quantity and more importantly, quality. About three years ago, the journal was receiving about 600 papers yearly. This has now increased to about 1000, almost a 70% increase. Of the 750–800 original research manuscripts, we can only publish about 160, so our rejection rate is approximately 75–80%. The quality of papers continues to increase too. This regrettably means that some good papers must be rejected. On the other hand, some really good papers are accepted and published, steadily improving our quality as judged by various metrics such as the ISI Impact Factor. Impact Factor: the 2009 listings just appeared, and we have again risen slightly, to 2.987. Liver International now ranks 18th amongst the 65 journals in gastroenterology/hepatology, so we are well within the top third. I still believe that impact factor is grossly overemphasized as an index to quantify journal quality, but like it or not, we are stuck with this measurement that appears to be highly valued by many readers and authors. ‘Citation anchor’: A few highly-cited papers can significantly improve the impact factor. Journals refer to such papers as ‘citation anchors’. For example, consensus guidelines and recommendations by major organizations are typically cited many times. In that regard, the journal is extremely gratified to publish in this issue, the latest consensus document by the International Ascites Club (IAC), on refractory ascites (1). The IAC has previously published consensus documents on a variety of topics in portal hypertension and ascites, including the definition of hepatorenal syndrome type 1 and type 2, and all of these have become very highly cited papers. Considering that I am currently chairman of the IAC as well as chief editor of Liver International, this may appear to be rather self-serving. I must confess that the publication of the IAC refractory ascites document in LI is not just coincidence – I lobbied for this paper to be sent to us. But I think that this could be a ‘win-win’ scenario for both organizations. Global perspective: Liver International continues to live up to its name, especially the ‘international’ part. Our editors and editorial board are truly global, and we publish papers from all parts of the world. The details of where our submissions originate have been previously published (2), so I won’t repeat that information which has not materially changed. The ‘big 3’ countries of origin continue to be China, USA and Japan, in that order, and they account for almost 40% of manuscript submissions. However, last year we had papers submitted from more than 40 countries. Now let’s discuss some displeasing things. Compared to the pleasing things, these are relatively small and in the big picture, perhaps fairly minor. Authorship proliferation: Although I commented on this issue last year (3), the problem of supernumerary authors, presumably mainly due to the unacceptable practice of ‘gift authorship’ continues to plague all journals including LI. Many centres in regions with hierarchical medical systems seem to view authorship as a ‘corporate’ paradigm where all persons working in that department are automatically listed as authors regardless of whether they contributed materially to the paper or not, with the chief as the last author. Recently we received a manuscript that reported a relatively small simple study with only 38 patients and 20 authors. I have great difficulty believing that all 20 authors truly met the criteria for authorship, and thus a number of these were likely the beneficiaries of ‘gift authorships’. We rejected this paper, not because of the authorship issue, but for scientific reasons. That said, we might have been a bit more sympathetic to the paper if it had had a more reasonable number of authors. Clueless authors: we continue to receive many manuscripts prepared by clueless authors. Okay, perhaps that term is unduly harsh, but just some relatively small investments in time and care can so easily turn a shoddily-prepared manuscript into a very presentable and much more potentially-acceptable paper. There are