An eventful year for the Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions.

The year 2016 marked the 13th year of publication for the Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions (JEEHP) and the 12th year of my editorship. This year, several events and successes for JEEHP are worth noting.

An important accomplishment this year was becoming indexed in MEDLINE beginning with the first article of 2016, as I announced previously. I received the letter of acceptance from the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee of the Electronic Journals Support Team, United States National Library of Medicine in March. It is great privilege to have been indexed in MEDLINE because it is so difficult to win inclusion.

On the other hand, the Content Selection & Advisory Board of Scopus informed us in May that our journal’s application to be listed in Scopus was rejected. The staff of Scopus has reported that JEEHP can re-submit the application after February 1, 2018. We will be well prepared for this resubmission.

The third event of 2016 for JEEHP was being accepted for listing in the KoreaMed database (http://koreamed.org). The journal passed the evaluation by the Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors in October. This was the second evaluation, after the first in 2009. The comments from the review committee were as follows:

The journal’s scope, instructions to authors, author’s role, ethical guidelines, and preparation of manuscripts were described precisely. Articles on medical health education from a variety of countries demonstrated the characteristics of an international journal very well. It is difficult to find any errors in the title, author, abstract, main text, and references based on the style and format of the journal. And, the effort of editor and provision of the budget by the publisher to maintain high quality publication should be greatly appreciated.

These comments were encouraging and correspond well with my own assessment of JEEHP.

The next major event of 2016 for JEEHP was learning that the journal has not yet been accepted for SCIE indexing. This was confirmed during a meeting in December in Philadelphia, PA, United States with the editors of Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters’ intellectual property and science business). The status will be re-evaluated in mid-2018 after confirming the data on citations by Web of Science Core Collection articles in 2017 of JEEHP articles published in 2015 and 2016. JEEHP has already been searchable in the Web of Science Core Collection as an Emerging Sources Citation Index journal since 2015. The citation metrics showed that JEEHP articles published in 2013 were cited 53 times up to the end of November 2016 by articles in the Web of Science Core Collection (Fig. 1). Furthermore, the diversity of author affiliations has increased year by year, reaching 31 nations in 2016 (Fig. 2). Those two metrics demonstrate that the journal articles are being actively read and cited and show that the journal is mediating a truly international academic conversation.

Fig. 1.

Number of citations of each year’s articles from 2004 to 2016 in Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions [cited 2016 Nov 30] available from: apps.webofknowledge.com/.

Fig. 2.

Number of nationalities of authors in Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions from 2004 to 2016.

One notable event occurred internally in 2016. A case of duplicate submission occurred in November. The submitter was notified and admitted to not carefully auditing the manuscript, which was drafted by a graduate student, before submission. After informing the corresponding author of the penalty of all contributing authors being restricted from submission to JEEHP for a year, this case was resolved within a month. Several editorial board members discussed the case as it played out. Since all manuscripts have been screened through CrossCheck (similarity check), it is easy to identify duplicate or plagiarized manuscripts. This was the first time I have experienced finding a duplicate submission in my role as editor of JEEHP. I appreciate that the corresponding author responded quickly and appropriately, minimizing any difficultly in resolving the case.

April of this year marked the establishment of an open data policy at JEEHP. Every author now agrees to open the raw data of their analysis as part of the submission process. One submitter refused to open the article’s associated data due to a worry about the use of the data by other researchers; therefore, the paper was withdrawn. The open data policy is mandatory to increase the scientific soundness of article submissions. Our journal is one of the first to adopt an open data policy in Korea.

Another development in journal management involved revision of the maximum length and number of references of submitted manuscripts. As of January 2017, the length of the main text of an article shall be limited to 2,250 words for research articles and 1,250 for brief reports. The number of references shall be limited to 15 for research articles and 7 for brief reports. Those two limitations are negotiable based on reasonable explanations from the corresponding author. This new policy is intended to emphasize the description of the core results and their interpretation. The maximum length of other publication types shall be changed according to that of research article and brief report. If the description of methods is too long, it may be moved to a supplement.

I would also like to note a concern about the formatting of submitted articles. From January 1 to December 26, 2016, 127 manuscripts were submitted. Among them, 5 editorials were commissioned articles. Sixty-five manuscripts out of 122 unsolicited articles (53.3%) were returned before the review process due to inadequate scope or style and format. The most common problem of returned manuscripts was the submitter’s ignorance of the instructions to authors. Unfortunately, JEEHP receives too many manuscripts that have not been properly formatted. I have not observed the problem to be as bad for other journals. After review, 20 manuscripts were rejected and 34 manuscripts were accepted. One is under revision, one is under review, and one is under resubmission. The overall acceptance rate of the unsolicited manuscripts submitted in 2016, excluding the 3 manuscripts still being processed, was 28.6% (34/119). Out of 46 articles in 2016, 1 editorial and 6 unsolicited articles were submitted in 2015.

This year also marked many new invitations to the editorial board; the board now includes members with affiliations in 32 countries on 6 continents. Dr. Sang Sun Lee, the founding editorial board member of the journal, stepped down, and Dr. Yong Soon Park took his place as an expert on nutrition education in Korea. Dr. Lee’s devotion to the journal from the time of its launch should not be forgotten.

Finally, I wish to express my appreciation to the journal’s reviewers for their contributions to JEEHP’s achievements. Without their help, this journal could not be published. The list of all the reviewers who contributed their services in 2016 is as follows:

Saaid Abbadi, Adel Abdelaziz, Keiko Abe, BV Adkoli, Yang Heui Ahn, Jacoline Albert, Abdulmoneim Alhayani, Ismail Azizi, Homa Behjo, Colin Block, Su-Jin Chae, Sarah Channon, Vasiliki Eirini Chatzea, Ara Cho, Eric Cioe, Chad Cook, Sandy Cook, Robert Cunningham, Mariana D’amico, Nihar Das, Coralie Therese Dimacali, Dilek Ekici, Soha Essawy, Christian Ezeala, Marie Fisher, Zeev Goldik, Taher Halawa, Jae Jin Han, Yera Hur, Kun Hwang, Hyenam Hwang, Rintaro Imafuku, Nafisa Iqbal, Geum-Hee Jeong, Yeonhee Jeong, Sirintip Kaewtip, Kyung-Hoon Kim, Shin Jeong Kim, Kyuseok Kim. Jong-Seok Lee, Young Hwan Lee, Eun Young Lim, Key Hwan Lim, Melanie Lybarger, Usman Mahboob, Jennifer Mai, Anna Miller-Fitzwater, Thuli Godfrey Mthemb, Julieanne Nichols, JungMi Oh, Cesar Orsini, Hanife Ozcelik, Guillermo Pradies, HyeRin Roh, Paul Salamh, Alice Salzman, Fitsum Sebisbe, Ravi Shankar, Sujin Shin, Dimitra Sifaki-Pistola, Aishwarya Singh , Mohan Sunkad, Mariyam Suzana, Mandie Svatek, Nur Afrainin Syah, Charles Vega, Alisa Wray, Alexis Wright, Mi Kyoung Yim, Jang-Won Yoon, and Bo Young Yoon.

I would like to apologize to all whose submissions were not accepted for publication. Restricting the number of articles published was necessary due to budget limitations. JEEHP is an open access journal without author-side submission fees or article processing charges. The publisher thus shoulders all the costs, and it is not possible to scale up the budget rapidly. However, as we are able to access additional funds, I do hope to begin accepting more manuscripts.

As the year 2016 draws to a close, I reflect on my job as a journal editor. JEEHP is devoted to the increase in quality of educational evaluation of health professionals and, like all health science journals, to the improved health of humanity. Much of the publication budget is funded by licensing examinees’ application fees and taxes on the Korean public. I therefore do my best not to waste a bit of the money and give my all to editing the articles chosen for publication. It is my hope that the authors and readers of JEEHP are satisfied with the journal we produce, and that together, we can achieve even greater results for JEEHP in 2017.