Happy Near Year to the readers, authors, and reviewers of the Journal of Vascular Surgery Cases, Innovations and Techniques (JVSCIT)! This past year was a tremendously productive and exciting year of growth for JVSCIT. We received a record 587 submissions. A sincere thank you to our committed reviewers and editorial board; your dedication resulted in improved submission to first decision time of far less than our goal of 30 days (23.8 days!), and the quality of the reviews helped to guide authors to generate excellent manuscripts. THANK YOU! A special thank you is in order to our top reviewers of the year who reviewed more than 10 manuscripts over 2023 (Table I). We recognize this work is volunteer, yet crucial, to the success of the journal. We simply could not do it without you. While we will continue to work hard on getting all manuscripts published online as soon as possible after acceptance, given the number of submissions in 2024, we have expanded our journal issues from our previous quarterly format to a bimonthly distribution.
Table I.
Reviewers handling more than 10 manuscripts
| Rana O. Afifi |
| Ayman Ahmed |
| Kwame S. Amankwah |
| Jeffrey L. Ballard |
| Donald Toru Baril |
| Robert J. Beaulieu |
| Saideep Bose |
| Anand Brahmandam |
| Keith D. Calligaro |
| Jesse Chait |
| Asad Choudhry |
| Jayer Chung |
| Michael C. Dalsing |
| David L. Dawson |
| Mario D’Oria |
| Yana Etkin |
| Alexander Gombert |
| Sukgu M. Han |
| E. John Harris |
| Joseph Patrick Hart |
| Dean A. Healy |
| Arjun Jayaraj |
| Issam Koleilat |
| Meryl Simon Logan |
| G. Matthew Longo |
| Thomas G. Lynch |
| Michael J. Malinowski |
| Nicolas J. Mouawad |
| Albeir Mousa |
| Stuart I. Myers |
| Naiem Nassiri |
| Patrick J. O’Hara |
| Robert B. Patterson |
| Eric Pillado |
| Lakshmikumar Pillai |
| Danielle Marie Pineda |
| Grayson Pitcher |
| Khalil Qato |
| Ravi Rajani |
| David Andrew Rigberg |
| Graham Roche-Nagle |
| Joseph R. Schneider |
| Lewis B. Schwartz |
| Sammy Siada |
| Niten Singh |
| Michael J. Singh |
| Emily Louise Spangler |
| Britt H. Tonnessen |
| Gian Franco Veraldi |
In addition to expanding our publication schedule, we also welcome seven new additions to our editorial board in 2024 (Table II). Similar to selection of our first editorial board last year, we used a blinded assessment of all current reviewers with a focus on the review completion rates (ratio of completed reviews divided by invited reviews), total number of completed reviews, and average reviewer scores by handling editors (out of a maximum score of one hundred). After this blinded review had generated a preliminary list of potential board members using these metrics, we unblinded the list to assess gender, geographical, and practice type distribution and selected the top performers. To maintain transparency, we also again sent out yearly “report cards” to all reviewers, which included these performance metrics with comparisons to the chosen editorial board members. We also published a “how to” guide on manuscript reviewing by our 2023 “Reviewer of the Year”, Grayson Pitcher.1 Give it a read if you wonder how you can improve the reviews you provide JVSCIT and other journals!
Table II.
2024 additions to the JVSCIT editorial board
| Paul DiMusto, MD, FACS |
| Sukgu Han, MD, MS, FSVS |
| Thomas Lynch, MD, MHCM, FACS, DFSVS |
| Stuart Meyers, MD, FACS, DFSVS |
| Bala Ramanan, MBBS, MS, FACS |
| Indrani Sen, MD |
| Michael J. Singh, MD, MBA, FACS, DFSVS, RPVI |
In 2023, we were able to increase our visibility by partnership with multiple vascular societies and meetings as well as increase our social media presence with the addition of our Instagram account. We have continued our author-centric promotions with regular #JVSCITTweetChats (now called #jvscitXchats). Our Instagram account has allowed us to develop other author-centric features, including a regular “Instagram Live” featuring “articles of the month” in which we discuss articles with authors of selected papers. These social media efforts were championed by our Associate Editor and Editor of Social Media, Leigh Ann O’Banion, with the assistance of our “Editor-in-Training” Eric Pillado. This training program was created to provide a graduate of the JVS internship with the opportunity to work together with the editors of JVSCIT and both handle papers but also develop an initiative to improve the journal. Dr Pillado, our first EIT, proposed developing an Instagram presence for the journal and has really shined in this role. If you are not already following, give us a follow on both our social media accounts (@JVascSurgCIT)! Other social media endeavors include our continued partnership with Audible Bleeding with quarterly podcasts that promote authors of selected JVSCIT manuscripts. Visit their website and take a listen if you have not had the chance.
This year we also continued developing “Virtual Special Issues.” These collections of articles focused on central topics that are solicited, promoted, and collated as collections. Benefits are demonstrated with increased reading/downloads of articles, increased citations, the ability to develop and promote guest editors, and the opportunity to create topic-specific collections within our portfolio. We named Mario D’Oria the VSI manager, and he has helped us develop this content and promote these topics. We have published two VSI in the past year, one focused on advanced techniques for the management of chronic limb-threatening ischemia, and one on genetic arteriopathies. If you have not taken the opportunity, view these collections on our website! We are currently collecting manuscripts for a VSI on aortic dissection and will soon start collecting manuscripts for a VSI on vascular trauma, so if you have an interesting case, technique, or video on either of these topics, submit today! In the future, we have plans to develop other VSIs on topics including pediatric vascular surgery, vascular complications, deep venous pathology, and oncovascular surgery. Stay tuned!
We are looking forward to 2024; our first goal of the year is to trial a “double-blind” review process for the JVS portfolio. The current state for all JVS portfolio journals is currently single-blind review in which reviewers’ names are blinded from the authors. While this anonymity may allow impartial decisions by reviewers, it may result in bias towards authors, institutions, genders, regions, or academic status of authors and may be used as justification for unnecessarily critical or harsh review comments. Our proposed state is a “double-blind” review in which in addition to the authors being blinded from the reviewers’ names, the reviewers will be blinded from the authors name and institution. The goal of this will be to limit reviewer bias and promote the consideration of manuscripts based on merit of content and not by author/institution name. During this trial, we will track metrics including overall acceptance rates as well as acceptance rates by country/region, first time authors, and other identifiable author characteristics as well as manuscript handling times. Our hope is to reduce bias while continuing to produce high quality manuscripts focused on case reports, techniques, and videos in vascular surgery.
Thank you once again to all our readers, authors, and reviewers. We are always available for comments/questions/concerns regarding our journal. Please reach out and have a wonderful New Year!
Reference
- 1.Pitcher G.S., Smeds M.R. Reviewing for the Journal of Vascular Surgery, Cases, Innovations and Techniques (JVS-CIT): A "how to" guide for reviewers. J Vasc Surg Cases Innov Tech. 2023;9 doi: 10.1016/j.jvscit.2023.101326. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]