Efforts begin to sprout: publications in JCSM on cachexia, sarcopenia and muscle wasting receive attention.

Does the world need a journal focusing on cachexia and sarcopenia, some asked in 2010 and 2011 when The Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle (for short: JCSM) had just been launched. Today, we are looking back at 4 years of activity with more than 140 published reviews, editorials, letters and most importantly, original research articles. Particularly in the beginning, it was sometimes not easy to fill the journal and many know that we still have a high acceptance rate, well above 50 %.

In 2011, we and our publisher, Springer, managed to get JCSM listed on the PubMed website, mainly because we are an Open Access journal. This helped our visibility a lot. To be more precise, we are listed in PubMed via a PubMed Central entry—but to the outside world, that is the same. Still, there are important fine nuances of difference, as only a MEDLINE acceptance appears to truly guarantee a PubMed listing. MEDLINE declined our first application last year.

JCSM is also listed in Scopus since 2011 (see http://www.scopus.com—this is the search system of Elsevier). You can also find us in Google Scholar since about the same time and in the second half of 2013, we received confirmation of our acceptance by ISI Web of Knowledge (Thomson-Reuters) to be considered for assessment of citations and impact factor retrospectively since the start of the journal in their 2013 Journal Citation Report. This is where things got exciting and speculation started as to what will be our impact factor?! We can now say that it is 7.413 for 2013, as we know since 29th of July. We are listed in the field “General and internal Medicine” on position 8 of 150. This is a great success for the editorial board together with our reviewers and for all of our research community. Had JCSM been listed in the field “Endocrinology and Metabolism”, it would have been 11th of the 123 that are now listed in this category, and amongst “Nutrition” journals, JCSM would have been ranked third of the 78 different publications there. A big thank you to all of you who have contributed to the journal in one way or another and to our readers.

For those of you who like technical details of how such an impact factor comes about, here’s some more information. The Impact Factor 2013 is calculated based on the citations in 2013 to items published in the two previous years in JCSM, divided by the sum of articles of those 2 years. In 2011, we published 22 articles that ISI considered full articles and we received 191 citations to 2011 items in 2013. In 2012, we published 24 articles that ISI considered full articles and we received 143 citations to 2012 items in 2013. The total of 341 citations and 46 papers resulted in the impact factor (ratio) of 7.413. It is important to note that our self-citation rate is only 4 %—we think that at any rate, <20 % is reasonable for a young journal like ours—established journals often have self-citation rates of 3–10 %.

In 2013, we had 22 citations to the 30 papers published in JCSM, which gives us an Immediacy Index of 0.733. Of these 30 articles published in 2013 in JCSM, 7 were reviews. Reviews in our journal had on average 119 references, the other 23 articles on average had 34 references. One other index, the cited half-life for the journal (which is the median age of the items cited in the current year analysed) is 2.5 years for JCSM, but likely, is not yet fully informative as our journal is too young. The average age of the items cited in JCSM itself is 8.5 years, and the 5-year impact factor for JCSM is 8.786.

As an indication of which papers published in JCSM have received most citations, we enclose two tables that are based on the ISI Web of Knowledge, as assessed on 1st August, 2014. In Table 1, the 10 best cited JCSM papers ever are listed. In Table 2 (section A–C), the 10 best cited JCSM papers published in JCSM in 2011, 2012, and 2013 are listed. Not surprisingly, many of the best cited papers are reviews, but also original research and trial reports as well as consensus statements are often cited.

Table 1

List of 10 best cited JCSM papers ever (as per 7 August 2014)

Table 2

List of 10 best cited JCSM papers published in 2011, 2012 and 2013 (as per 7 August 2014)

We hope this gives you some insights into how JCSM is doing. We want to develop the journal further and hope to have some news on future developments soon. For now, we are happy about the development so far and somewhat proud of an impact factor that is rather high. The field of cachexia and sarcopenia research is clinically important, innovative and interesting. The good news received is also a big challenge for the future. We hope that together, we can keep the journal at a high quality standard even if some more papers are published in the future. We expect that submission will increase and apologize already, as certainly we will have to increase the rejection rate somewhat. But again, let’s see how we will fare and how we can solve these problems. For now, thanks again to all of you—and please keep submitting your best work to JCSM.