During 2011, the journal's editorial committee, together with the wholehearted support of Elsevier and especially that of Silvia Bofill, has made an effort towards raising its quality, as noted in our initial objectives. To do so, we have tried to streamline the publishing process deadlines: allocating work to the editor (nearly automatic, with an average time of less than 2 days); remitting the work to the revisors (less than 10 days); reply from these and first decision (48 days); author's revision and second decision (normally the definitive one, if the first one was not so) – 37 days. The total process time involved an average of 13 and a half weeks. The publisher itself considers this term as excellent.
When we include the up-dating of issues, many of which are specially requested and have a somewhat different process, 64 manuscripts were received during a period of a year. Out of these, 11 were withdrawn from the system (by the author's decision), 37 were accepted and 17 rejected. This means there was a rejection rate of 31%, which would be higher if we added work withdrawn by the authors, then reaching 43.7%.
Taking into account our journal's special characteristics, we must thank our authors for their generosity in sending us their work; our successive calls in this area have had positive consequences. Thirty-eight manuscripts were received in 2008; this went up to 88 in 2009 and to 104 in 2010 – and 64 have been received so far in 2011 (these words written at the beginning of the second semester). There is no doubt that this is the secret to increase quality: to have enough good work to make it possible to choose the best.
We have recently started to receive work from other countries, as a result of the efforts of the SECOT board of directors in the international area. We have thus received work from Chile, Argentina, Morocco and Portugal during the last year. This is another aspect that is especially appreciated when assessing journal standards in international bibliographical institutions.
We would also like to emphasise the work of the revisors. We have sent up to 258 invitations to colleagues who are considered experts in the subjects dealt in the manuscripts to assess. Collaboration has been very positive, even though the appraisers were not able to carry out their task on 105 occasions, 15 replied regretting they had to reject the invitation and many more did not send any reply. Fortunately, the work of the rest of them, together with that of the editors, compensated for these shortages and delays, especially in some specific fields. The revisors’ work is crucial in the final result of the editing process. In this issue, we publish the list of those who have worked with us and to whom we want to reiterate out thanks.
Finally, the publishers Elsevier have made an important effort in editing, not only electronically but in printed format, and distributing the journal. Each issue has taken less time, even though there is still room for improvement.
This year's work has been intensive and we look forward to its results, to achieve the goal that this editorial team took on under the commission of the last two presidents of SECOT, and continuously and enthusiastically supported now by the current one: to get the journal included in international indices and to give it that so hackneyed impact factor, a questionable but unavoidable tool for assessing scientific production.
Please cite this article as: Gil Garay E. Una perspectiva anual. Rev esp cir ortop traumatol. 2011;55(6):419.
