Journal of Foot and Ankle Research: the first ten years

Journal of Foot and Ankle Research (JFAR) was launched in July 2008 as the official research publication of the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists (UK) and the Australasian Podiatry Council, replacing both the British Journal of Podiatry and the Australasian Journal of Podiatric Medicine. This editorial celebrates the 10 year anniversary of the journal.


Peer review metrics
JFAR receives between 100 and 150 papers each year, of which approximately 50 are accepted for publication. The acceptance rate is trending downwards and is currently 36%. The average time to a first editorial decision for reviewed manuscripts is 55 days, and the average time from submission to acceptance is 112 days (this includes the time taken to find peer reviewers and the time taken for authors to revise their manuscripts). Over the past 10 years, the time taken to find peer reviewers has increased. This reflects the growing global burden of peer review in the biomedical literature, which has been estimated at 63 million hours per year [8].

Fate of rejected papers
To determine the fate of papers rejected from JFAR, we extracted the first 100 rejected papers from the editorial database, and searched PubMed and Google Scholar in April 2018 using the title, key words and author names of each paper. Of these papers, 39 could not be located in another journal. The remaining 61 papers were subsequently published in 45 different journals (including six foot and ankle journals), the most common destination journals being The Foot (seven papers) and Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association (six papers). The time period between rejection from JFAR and subsequent publication in another journal ranged from 0 to 58 months (median 16). These data provide evidence of a journal hierarchy amongst foot and ankle researchers, with papers eventually published in The Foot, Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association, Diabetic Foot and Ankle, Foot and Ankle Online Journal, Foot and Ankle Specialist and Foot and Ankle Surgery first being submitted to JFAR. However, it is also likely that JFAR receives manuscripts rejected from other journals, particularly specialist biomechanics, sports medicine, orthopaedics, diabetes and rheumatology journals.

Journal performance metrics
There are several citation-based metrics to evaluate journal performance. By far the most widely used is the Impact Factor (IF), first developed in 1955 [9]. The IF represents the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years   More recently, the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) has been developed by the technology company SCImago Lab [11]. The SJR uses Elsevier's more extensive Scopus® database and uses a more complex algorithm similar to Google's PageRank which accounts for both the number of citations and the prestige of the journals where the citations came from. JFAR's SJR (0.873) is second only to Foot and Ankle International (Fig. 5). Finally, Elsevier's new CiteScore metric [12], which reflects the average citations per document that a title receives over a three-year period  These data clearly show that JFAR has performed extremely well for a relatively young journal. However, JFAR's position on citation metrics, as outlined in our 2012 editorial, remains that "rather than agonising over ubiquitous yet flawed journal performance metrics, we will continue to make editorial decisions based on the relevance and scientific quality of individual manuscripts" [10].

Notable papers
The impact of individual papers can be assessed in several ways: the number of accesses, the number of citations, and the number of mentions on social media. Table 1 shows the top ten papers according to each of these metrics, using data from the JFAR website, the Scopus® database, and Altmetric Attention Scores, respectively. The most accessed manuscript in the 10-year history of the journal is Bristow's clinical guideline for the recognition of malignant melanoma [13], the most cited paper is Redmond et al's normative values for the Foot Posture Index [14], and the paper with the most social media coverage is Neal et al's systematic review of foot posture as a risk factor for lower limb overuse injury [15].
Another way to assess the relative importance of papers is by applying the hierarchy of evidence, which places systematic reviews above all other study designs, including randomised trials, non-randomised studies, observational studies, case series studies and case reports. In this context, it is pleasing to note that JFAR has published a total of 31 systematic reviews. These reviews have summarised the best available evidence for a wide range of topic areas, including the effectiveness of treatments such as foot orthoses [16], stretching [17], dry needling [18], laser therapy [19], prolotherapy [20], extracorporeal shock-wave therapy   [21] and soft tissue surgery [22]. Systematic reviews are an extremely valuable resource for clinicians trying to keep up to date with the growing body of research literature pertaining to the treatment of foot disorders.

Website traffic
The

Future directions
As the first foot and ankle journal to fully embrace open access publishing, JFAR has been an early adopter of innovations in academic publishing. Consistent with BMC's ethos of transparency, we operate an open peer review process (where authors' and reviewers' identities are disclosed), and we publish all peer reviews on our website. The BMC platform also allows for non-traditional content to be uploaded to support manuscripts, including video files [23] and downloadable 3-dimensional models [24]. Engaging readers, however, particularly time-poor clinicians, is an ongoing challenge for all scholarly journals. Relatively recent innovations to improve readability, engagement and translation include video abstracts [25] and infographicsbrief summaries of research papers that use data visualisation techniques to convey key messages [26]. Several journals have trialed infographics, either to supplement full papers or as stand-alone, peer-reviewed publications. At JFAR, we will explore all strategies for improving the reader experience while ensuring that the information provided is as accurate and unbiased as possible.

Editorial changes
Professor Hylton Menz (Editor-in-Chief, Australia) and Professor Alan Borthwick, OBE (Editor-in-Chief, UK) will step down from their roles at the end of July 2018. The new Editors-in-Chief will be Professor Keith Rome (AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand) and Professor Catherine Bowen (University of Southampton, UK), the new Deputy Editors will be Dr. Andrew Buldt (La Trobe University, Australia) and Dr. Michelle Spruce (Blandford Forum and Wareham, UK) and the Associate Editors will be Mr Daniel Bonanno (La Trobe University, Australia), Dr Cylie Williams (Monash University, Australia) and Dr Anita Williams (Salford University, UK).

Thanks and acknowledgements
The authors would like to sincerely thank the following individuals for contributing to JFAR's success over the past 10 years: past and present editorial colleagues (  Chadwick from the College of Podiatry/Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists, and Stephen Hartman from the Canadian Federation of Podiatric Medicine). We would also like to thank our editorial board and peer reviewers for their tireless efforts in assessing the suitability of papers for publication.