Andalusian Journal of Sports Medicine: Balance 2019
Abstract
The Revista Andaluza de Medicina del Deporte (RAMD), born in 2008 with a vocation to occupy a prominent place in the Ibero-American area and provide scientific rigor to its specific field, has come along its course extending its dissemination and distribution in all the professional fields related to medicine and sports sciences and nowadays it is a reference, inside and outside our country, among the publications of this area of knowledge.
Complying with one of the editorial quality requirements of scientific journals, as usual, we include in this first issue of the year a balance of the previous one, as well as an analysis of the expectations of the journal in the year we have started.
2019 has been a year of consolidation for the Revista Andaluza de Medicina del Deporte (RAMD), in relation to our adherence to new editorial strategies, the improvement of the quality indexes of our publication and the optimization of public resources.
In this sense, the management of th RAMD through the Open Journal System (OJS) platform (http://lajunta.es/13d5y), has been a great step to improve the quality of the magazine, since it has allowed to publish a greater number of articles, in full text and in free access, in a more agile and transparent way and with all the criteria of editorial quality that a scientific journal requires. Table 1 shows the data related to number of articles received and the number of articles published in our journal.
As may be seen, despite receiving a similar number of articles along the years, the speeding up of the evaluation and publication processes through the OJS system, it has allowed us to publish a total of 95 articles this year, which is a average of 19 articles per published number. Taking into account that during 2019 only 29.41% of the articles received have been accepted for publication in our journal, the number of plublished articles takes more relevance. In addition, these articles have been published in PDF, HTML and XML format, which facilitates the inclusion of our documentary collection in the main repositories of scientific information.
During 2019, the number of articles pending an editorial decision or publication has been drastically reduced, as shown in Table 2, in which if we take into account that of the total of 49 articles in the process of revision or publication, 15 are incomplete, only 29 items are in the process of anonymous peer review and five are in the process of production and correction of the final galleys.
Another fact that has been significantly improved has been the response times. During 2019, the average time elapsed between the receipt of a submission and the first decision has been reduced to 6.95 days and the average time elapsed from the reception of the submission to the final decision has been reduced to 70.71 days.
Finally, and where it has been possible to reduce more the time periods, it is in the publication of a summary of the accepted articles in our online section, since during this year the average of this time has been 3.68 days.
In this sense it is very much appreciated the collaboration of our reviewers who in an altruistic way send their comments to the RAMD. In this year 185 reviewers have been invited, of which 41.62% have completed the review of the articles we have assigned them, surely improving this response rate will be the key to reduce the time we take to make a final decision on the submissions received.
Table 3 shows the evolution of the different bibliometric indices of the RAMD from 2015 to the present, most of them are slightly improved or are maintained in similar values to the previous year.
However, we have increased the number of citations in Scopus by 30, our H Index has increased to 11 (at least 11 of our publications have received 11 citations) and we remain at the same level as previous years in the SCImago Journal Rank ( SJR) and Secondary Composite Index Broadcasting (ICDS). Published articles come mainly from Spain, Brazil, Chile and Portugal.
The objectives to be reached by 2020 are very diverse because, apart from continuing to improve our quality indexes and the visibility of the journal, our main challenge is the drastic reduction of response times to authors, in relation to the various decisions editorials, because we are aware of the improvement margin that our journal has in this area.
We also want to improve the publication in the various formats required by the different databases, so that the RAMD articles are increasingly accessible to researchers. In short, we face 2020 with renewed illusions to continue improving the quality and accessibility of articles published in the RAMD and turn it into a tool at the service of researchers in medicine and sports sciences.
