Editorial: Our Enthusiasm for “Related Research”

At Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research^®, we believe that the effective, complete clinician is one who stays current on the major developments in orthopaedic science. Likewise, the thoughtful bone biologist maintains at least a peripheral awareness of the major breakthroughs in orthopaedic engineering and other related areas of basic science. Unfortunately, our lives are busy, time is short, and it is not always possible for us to keep up with the latest advances. Our goal is to make this task easier for you by publishing the best quality basic science research, and using features and commentaries to make this material as enjoyable and usable as possible.

Basic research submitted to CORR^® is evaluated by experts. We are fortunate to have among our five senior editors Clare M. Rimnac PhD, who is both an internationally known engineer, and an experienced, skillful medical editor. Dr. Rimnac, a recent past president of the Orthopaedic Research Society and the Associate Dean for Research at Case Western Reserve University School of Engineering, participates in every stage of the basic science article’s “life cycle”—from initial evaluation, through reviewer selection and decision-making, to the final editorial process.

Our “related research” standards are no different from those we use for our “clinical orthopaedics.” Our goal is to publish articles—whether clinical or basic—that will affect how we think about important problems that influence our specialty.

We take steps to promote the best of these published papers, ensuring that as many readers as possible will enjoy the content. To provide readers additional context, we emphasize some basic science articles with CORR Insights^® commentaries, as we did recently highlighting a clinically relevant review of neuronal phenotypes in tendinopathy [4]. We regularly promote these commentaries on our Facebook page and through CORR^®’s Twitter feed, which, combined, are seen by thousands of our followers every day. To further raise the visibility of basic science research, we feature the most important articles in our Editor’s Spotlight/Take 5 section, which includes an interview with one or more of the investigators on the research team of a manuscript we have chosen to be particularly interesting to our audience. We recently published an Editor’s Spotlight/Take 5 for a nanoscience article detailing bioreactors [3]; our tracking metrics show that our readers avidly read these features, and the long reach of our publishing partner, Springer^©, puts our content at the fingertips of readers in more than 8,000 institutions worldwide. Publish your basic science work in CORR^® and it will be seen.

As should be evident, we are proud of the basic science research that we publish. We believe articles like the work of Kose et al. [2] and Gurkan et al. [1] will influence thought on the topics of infection prevention nanotechnology, and the signaling pathways associated with osteogenesis, respectively, for years to come. We are also proud to work for a sophisticated, scientifically literate audience. As I write this editorial, a basic science article about a biomaterial-based approach to promote bone formation is on our list of top-3 most-downloaded articles of the week [5]. Our basic science symposium (“Bone Quality – From Bench to Bedside,” CORR^® August 2011) is among the most-downloaded symposia we have published in recent years, amassing, on average, nearly 500 downloads per article. For a general-interest orthopaedic journal, that gives you—our readers—some serious intellectual bragging rights. It also confirms what I have always believed: there is a place for well-presented good science in the lives and practices of orthopaedic surgeons and the scientists who work alongside them.

If you are a scientist, send us your “related research.” This journal and its readers, are interested. If you are a clinician, look to CORR^® for the best, most innovative papers in the orthopaedic basic sciences, along with insightful commentaries and features on these articles. They will help you practice more thoughtfully.