A year in retrospect
Authors: R Coronel
Journal: Cardiovascular Research (1996)

The present Editorial Team has been in office for 1 year now and it is time to briefly look back before proceeding to the order of the day. In the past year, 657 manuscripts have been sent to us for evaluation. A minority (1.3%) of the submitted manuscripts were considered unsuitable for publication in Cardiocascular Research. The decision of unsuitability is made in one of our weekly editorial board meetings and the manuscript is not sent to reviewers. In the last year, most of these manuscripts were purely methodological papers without providing insight into (pathoJphysiologica1 mechanisms. The authors were given the advise to send their work to other journals, where it may attract the proper attention. The relatively small fraction of papers that were deemed unsuitable reflects the wide area of interest which characterizes the authorand readership of this journal. The Editorial Decisions about acceptability for publication in Cardiouascular Research involve the evaluation of the manuscripts by the authors’ peers and the option of two rounds of revision. This short notice discusses the facts associated with the first Editorial Decision between 1 June 1995 and 1 June 1996. It is the aim of the Editorial Team to send each manuscript to three reviewers. This goal is reached in 86% of manuscripts. Especially during the summer and Chrismas holidays it is a cumbersome task to find reviewers. On the average, 2.9 ‘peers’ are found to be willing to review a manuscript. To match manuscripts with reviewers we are aided by a database of reviewers and their selection of keywords. Since May 1995 we have sent requests to potential reviewers to fill out a form containing a list of keywords pertinent to this journal. Fig. 1 shows the growth of the database of reviewers since June 1995. Although many reviewers responded promptly (as may be expected from reviewers of Cardiovascular Research), it took us some time to enter the data into the computer. The Amsterdam Editors all recall the first chaotic weeks of our editorship when only those reviewers with surnames starting with A, B or C were available. One of those ‘early’ reviewers has such a wide selection of keywords that he came up in almost every search we performed (and he still does). It is our object not to burden our reviewers with more than one manuscript at a time and certainly not with more than several a year. In the transitional phase, however, this was not always possible to achieve. We apologize to those reviewers who have received ‘urgent requests’ within a too small time window. The illustration also demonstrates that the growing pains were over around September 1995. At present the number of reviewers is 1641. After sending out the manuscripts to the reviewers it is the prime task of the Editors to see that the reports are returned. We use the incentive of a reward (a compact disk or booklet) when the report is returned before the Reviewers’ Deadline of 21 days after sending out of the manuscript. After that, the reviewers are regularly reminded of their commitment. The performance of the reviewers in terms of their compliance with the deadline is shown in Fig. 2. Sixty-nine percent of the reports were received before the Reviewers’ Deadline (note that the time for postal handling is included in this period). We are very proud of this extremely short response time and grateful to our reviewers, who allow us to reach Editorial Decisions on such short notice. The Editorial Office maintains an Editorial Deadline of 28 days after sending out the manuscript. Before this self-imposed deadline as many of the reports as possible are to be recovered. The average number of reviewers’ reports that are returned is 2.7 per manuscript, indicating that in this respect the Editorial Office has a 93% efficiency. The reports form the basis of the Editorial Decisions. After the Editorial Deadline decisions are taken based on the available reviewer’s reports, mostly 2 or very rarely on 1. These ‘late’ Decisions are all made in one of the weekly Editorial Board meetings and may be further postponed for the acquisition of additional advise. Fig. 3 shows the number of Editorial Decisions as a function of