Each October, AJKD editorial office staff members crunch data on submissions, turnaround times, and bibliometrics to help the editors determine which aspects of the journal are working well and which need work. At Kidney Week, Editor-in-Chief Levey and Deputy Editor Weiner present the highlights to the journal’s editorial board—the 50+ Associate Editors, plus 10 Feature Editors and their boards.

Dr. John T. Harrington

At this year’s meeting, Dr Levey took a moment to recognize Dr John T. Harrington for establishing and developing the World Kidney Forum, the freely-available journal feature reviewing socioeconomic, geopolitical, ethical, and historical issues related to kidney disease. Dr Levey presented Dr Harrington with a bound volume of the World Kidney Forum articles he’s overseen, as well as a framed letter of appreciation. As Dr Harrington steps down, incoming Feature Editor Dr Christopher G. Winearls and his board (Drs Dwomoa Adu, Garabed Eknoyan, John Harrington, Tazeen Jafar, Miguel Riella, and Wim Van Biesen) will be recruiting authors to continue the series through December 2016, when Dr Levey’s tenure as AJKD Editor-in-Chief comes to a close.

Dr Levey introduced Dr Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh as the new editor responsible for the Imaging Teaching Case, a feature originally launched by Dr Charles O’Neill. Each article in the series is a case report that is designed to educate clinicians on interpretation and applications of imaging in clinical nephrology. Dr Kalantar-Zadeh’s team will comprise Drs Raimund Hirschberg, Morton Kern, Chandana Lall, and Jaime Landman.

Dr Levey then thanked the Associate Editors for their service as Acting Editors-in-Chief (this is the pathway by which manuscripts with an editor as an author are handled without the involvement of the regular editorial team) and announced that a just-published series of articles handled by Acting Editors-in-Chief will be freely available for a limited time. These articles arose from a joint NKF-FDA scientific workshop on GFR as an end point for clinical trials in CKD and include a Special Report summarizing the initiative, 3 Original Investigations reporting data analyses conducted for the workshop, and 3 editorials that provide additional context and perspectives.

Next, Drs Levey and Weiner summarized key journal metrics. The number of manuscripts received continues to rise, with a double-digit percentage increase in Original Investigations submissions over the past year. The region with the fastest growth in submissions is Eastern Asia, for which the number of manuscripts received has more than tripled since 2002.

In terms of published content, AJKD continues to devote considerable journal space to educational content (eg, teaching cases, the freely available Quiz Page series), expert commentaries on content in AJKD and other journals, and comprehensive reviews. For the third year running, such articles were more numerous than the sum total of studies and reports. Although such articles are not always highly cited, AJKD’s Impact Factor continues to rise, with the latest value (5.756) making AJKD the top-ranked journal focusing on clinical nephrology.

Of course, Original Investigations remain the bread-and-butter of journal content, and at last year’s editorial meeting, the editors stated their determination to reduce consideration and production times to make publication as efficient as possible. What’s the verdict? In news sure to be welcome to AJKD authors, the latest data show that the median time from submission to online publication has dropped by more than 6 weeks.

Another development of interest to authors is that AJKD now offers single sign-on via ORCID IDs. This means that authors who are registered at orcid.org no longer have to create a separate account to submit a manuscript through AJKD’s Editorial Manager system; instead, they can login with their ORCID credentials—good news for anyone who struggles to keep track of online accounts!

As we’ve detailed previously, the AJKD.org website saw a major redesign earlier this year. The redesign seems to have been received favorably, given that there was a 33% increase in monthly full-text downloads at the journal platform this year. In addition to the boost at AJKD.org, 16% more AJKD articles were downloaded at the journal’s ScienceDirect site, and there are also indications of upward trends for AJKD content accessed through Clinical Key and via the HINARI program.

As the meeting closed, the editors queued up the traditional lighthearted close to the meeting, a slideshow of the editorial office typos throughout the year. For anyone who’s ever grumbled at a rejection letter or a revision request, here’s proof that the editors can be pretty clueless sometimes!

-by Nijsje Dorman, AJKD Managing Editor

The AJKD Editors Blooper Reel, 2014:

1. Ask dr gold garb from NYU to review.
2. In this paper on MCD in adults, a reviewer wondered if some people started out as children.
3. I’m sorry the system was cooperating when you tried earlier.
4. Describe in greater detail ascertainment for the stud outcomes.
5. This approach is not god enough.