Our Society has changed and has notably increased its membership in recent years, reaching a considerable figure within the Scientific Societies of Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology and also having a significant influence over other societies. This has led us to consider its sustainability, partly due to the socioeconomic context we are currently living through. Thus, in addition to adequately adjusting all the areas of SECOT, such as its Journal, continuous training and Congress – of which we have had to assume all management duties, from its scientific activity to transparency in its organization – we will also be submitting, like the previous board did, all activities to an external audit which will assess their management and, if necessary, will enable future measures to be adopted.
Regarding the Spanish Journal of Traumatology and Orthopedic Surgery (Revista Española de Cirugía Ortopédica y Traumatología), it has been two years since I became President of SECOT, coinciding with the much-awaited indexation of the Journal. During this period, in addition to having an international publication, we have also made considerable efforts. Therefore, I must express my gratitude to its Director, Prof. Javier Vaquero Martín, for creating a structure that will stand the test of time with no surprises, adopting any necessary changes and working with those people who are prepared to dedicate the time that the Journal requires.
However, as I mentioned in the inaugural editorial of my chairmanship, having an indexed Journal is very important, but it is not everything. In fact, a poor management of resources could lead to the Journal being removed from the index. Journals are made good by the possibility of selecting articles and rejecting those which are not relevant, by having an editorial line to which researchers and manuscripts adhere, by having a team of critical reviewers who are also able to help improve articles, section editors who can combine and smooth out assessments and a Director who dedicates his effort to coordinating the entire group in the most agile manner possible. A Journal is not its Director or its publishing company; it is the group of people with sufficient experience in their field to increase the level and prestige of the publication and, naturally, the specialists who send articles of increasing quality.
Indexing led to a significant change in the contract with the publisher. Having an indexed journal with a good publishing company is costly, and we have had to adopt certain measures which members have hardly perceived; increasing advertising, a difficult task in the current environment, reducing the paging and weight of the paper, reducing case reports to a minimum, as these have other means of publication available and are not counted towards the Journal's impact index, and reducing, as far as possible, the print run by adopting measures to facilitate and promote online distribution. Furthermore, we continue to maintain the English translation, which has brought considerable international visibility and is very important to obtain a higher impact factor.
However, in addition to being good, a journal has to be promoted and disseminated within its corresponding field. The previous Board already opened SECOT to more Spanish-speaking countries; we have established excellent relations with most Spanish-speaking orthopedic surgery societies and this has resulted in more submissions to our Journal, as well as an increase in publications from the other side of the Atlantic. Having Latin American specialists among our members must be a priority for us for many reasons: it contributes to expand our vision and objectives to a world of unsuspected possibilities to work, increasingly more, as part of an international network of specialists with a common language which can gain an importance comparable to that of the English-speaking world.
On the other hand, as we have commented, the Journal now reaches online members who can thus avoid having to collect its issues in shelves. It also allows interesting articles to be visualized and allows for greater dissemination. In many ways, this has also contributed to improve the Journal's impact index.
Research continues to be an unfinished business. At SECOT it can be analyzed very easily: our SECOT Foundation carries out an annual effort to award grants and prizes, and to sponsor projects. Each prize offered receives nearly 30 projects; it is not fitting that this effort to submit research projects leads to such scarce results. Something is not working in our civil and scientific society when such considerable eagerness achieves such meagre results, and unfortunately, this leads to a lack of research works featured in the Journal.
Every scientist – including orthopedic surgeons, until proven otherwise – requires an updated CV which can be requested at any time to access a new position. Having worked on publications and projects is essential and an indexed Journal with an impact factor is very helpful. Furthermore, many CVs nowadays are summed up through the H index of the researcher, an increasingly popular system proposed by Hirsch, a physicist from the University of California, which measures the professional quality of scientists according to the number of citations received by their scientific articles. A factor of H=20 means that a scientist has a published 20 articles which have been cited 20 times or more. Regardless of its advantages and drawbacks, this index either grows or stagnates, thus allowing professional performance to be measured, comparisons to be made between the careers of scientists with different ages and, most importantly, it prevents manipulations.
Nevertheless, there are still some challenges which, leaving the Board aside, I should not be responsible for but, like any member of SECOT, I should attempt to promote with all my effort: submitting high-quality articles for revision by our Journal, before sending them to other international publications, citing articles from SECOT's Journal in works submitted to international publications, and assessing any articles requested, and I will support any Board in order to help the Journal have a high-quality and efficient editorial organization, with continuity and comprised by experienced and judicious members.
SECOT has a long history and, very often, must bear that weight, but there will come a time when we will have to sit down to analyze the future, with simple statutes, and decide the best way to fit together the Journal with a professional and solid editorial structure. We have already made some significant progress, but, at this moment, we must also be aware of our goals.
Please cite this article as: Forriol F. SECOT cubriendo etapas. Rev Esp Cir Ortop Traumatol. 2014;58:259–260.
