Editorial: Strategy for BJOT development

The British Journal of Occupational Therapy (BJOT) has come a very long way, from being a combined resource for professional development and a place for advertising jobs and courses, to its main focus as a scientific journal in 1993, and to gaining its first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in 2013, and increased from 0.779 in 2019 to 0.960 in 2020. BJOT has a new editorial team and, together with its Editorial Board and a newly formed International Advisory Board, now requires a strategy for taking the journal forward. In simple terms, this strategy needs to benefit the profession by increasing the scientific quality of the papers published as evidence. It also needs to increase the standing of BJOT by working towards an improved JIF. By increasing the scientific quality of the papers published, this will improve the evidence available to support professional practice and service development. It will also increase citations of that evidence, which is an important metric for the JIF, and an application to become indexed in Medline will, when accepted, improve visibility for occupational therapy evidence to support practice. This editorial will identify the factors that are guiding this strategy. We are in a time of change in publishing. With issues such as Open Access publishing and online access development, many alternatives to the JIF have been considered. However, at present the Journal Impact Factor remains ‘one of the most effective methods for assessing scholarly activity’ (Kaldas et al., 2020: 83). Medline is ‘the largest and most prestigious biomedical bibliographic database worldwide’ (Lyne, 2018: 273). As such, any article published in a journal indexed in Medline is more easily discovered in online searches, and is also enhanced by the availability of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). To become indexed with Medline, the journal needs to demonstrate a high scientific quality of articles published along with an infrastructure to support authors, reviewers and the profession. Medline indexation also has the effect of increasing the citation rates of published articles, and consequently improving the JIF. So, a basic question when considering this is, ‘what is the current level of evidence in occupational therapy, and how do we go about improving it? ’ Levels of evidence have been a consistently changing focus of attention for many years. In March 2009, the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine (CEBM) in Oxford published what has become one of the main standard classifications (Phillips et al., 2009). However, alongside the CEBM, and for the purpose of this editorial, a ‘new evidence pyramid’ (Murad et al., 2016) will be used to categorise the articles published in BJOT. The authors of this article recognise that there is an accepted hierarchy of evidence, with systematic reviews/meta-analyses at the top, going down through randomised controlled trials (RCTs), cohort studies, case control studies, crosssectional studies and case series/reports. Below these are also opinion-based articles. However, Murad et al. (2016) also recognise that the relative quality of the research and resulting article can create interplay between these levels, within which, for example, a poorly conducted and reported RCT may fall below a well conducted and reported cohort study. They also suggest that the top tier of evidence (systematic reviews and meta-analyses) can be viewed as a lens through which to examine the other levels of evidence (Murad et al., 2016). While this categorisation works well for quantitative research, a major problem for occupational therapy is that to date there is no similar categorisation for qualitative literature. Although there are standardised tools for critically appraising qualitative research papers (CASP) (2018), attempts to provide a method of gauging the level of evidence represented by qualitative research (Cesario et al., 2002) have not been widely adopted. There is a wealth of qualitative evidence