Well, colleagues, this will be my last Editorial for the Journal of Investigative Medicine (JIM) under the BMJ flag. Beginning in January 2023, JIM will publish under the aegis of a new publisher, SAGE.
For me, the last 3 years as Editor-in-Chief of JIM have been both very exciting and rewarding, and I will briefly summarize some of the highlights and achievements from my tenure.
2019: I was appointed EIC mid-year, and per my first editorial,1 one of my key strategies was to introduce new article types that addressed faculty development, education, mentoring, and careers.
2020: In addition to celebrating JIM’s 25th anniversary, we introduced a monthly podcast. The first episode featured my personal perspectives on the microbiome field. Since that time, we’ve published 33 podcasts, with an average of 444 listens per podcast.
2021: Submission growth surpassed previous years, showing an increase of 50% from 2016 to 2021. On the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, JIM published two articles that have generated a great deal of attention, as evidenced by their Altmetrics scores: ‘Long COVID-19 following mild SARS-CoV-2 infection: characteristic T cell alterations and response to antihistamines’,2 a research article published in October by Glynne et al, and ‘COVID-19 reinfection: a rapid systematic review of case reports and case series’,3 a brief report published in May by Wang et al. The first of these articles is the highest downloaded article published since JIM began at BMJ.
2022: At this writing, the editorial team continues to improve the quality of JIM submissions, as evidenced by an immediate rejection rate of nearly 50% and a decreased acceptance rate for all papers of 28%. Web traffic has grown steadily in the past 5 years and is expected to increase by 20% over 2021, and JIM’s 2021 impact factor of 3.301 (announced in June 2022) was a 14% increase over 2020, evidence of the improved quality of the content published in JIM.
I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank the BMJ team for their ‘stewardship’ of JIM. Specifically, I am deeply grateful to Kathleen Lyons, head of Portfolio, based in Hoboken, New Jersey (yes, the birthplace of Frank Sinatra); Hannah Martin, based in London, JIM’s production editor, who helped us produce and finalize each issue from BMJ; and our great editorial assistant team of Rachel Wright, Chloe Tuck, and Caty Waterfield.
Overall, I say to you, my American Federation for Medical Research (AFMR) colleagues and all our readers and contributors to JIM, in the words of an Australian with a love for cricket, we have had a good ‘inning’ with BMJ and will always be grateful and appreciative of the ties and relationship between AFMR and BMJ.
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Footnotes
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
