CJASN: What’s Behind and What’s Ahead

The past 12 months have been busy at the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN), because this past year, we received the highest volume of submissions for peer review since the inception of the journal. We begin 2018 grateful for the tireless efforts of our editorial team, the trust reposed by authors in submitting their high-quality work to CJASN, and the countless hours of volunteer work by members of our editorial board and reviewers. We are also grateful to our readers, as CJASN remains the most widely read peer-reviewed research journal in nephrology.

The primary focus at CJASN has always been on publishing the highest-quality original research papers that move the field forward in a meaningful way. We are committed to maintain that as the primary focus of what we do. To promote rigorous and fair peer review, at least two editors evaluate every manuscript submitted to CJASN before deciding to send for external peer review. Three experts in the field evaluate most papers sent for external peer review, and the full editorial team evaluates favorably reviewed papers. Through this process, we are committed to giving each paper that we receive a thorough and fair assessment and publishing the highest quality of clinical and translational research in nephrology.

At the same time, we are mindful that the effect of the work that we publish is dependent on our ability to draw the attention of busy professionals to the content of CJASN. In these past 12 months, we have launched two initiatives to broaden the reach of our publications—podcasts and visual abstracts. Each month, we identify two research articles for podcasts that are submitted by the authors as an audio file, which is then edited by Sara Leeds at the American Society of Nephrology. In this coming year, we plan to continue with the podcasts but shorten them to run for 2–3 minutes. CJASN was the first nephrology journal to launch visual abstracts, and we are grateful to our team of five talented editors who are arguably the pioneers for such presentations in our specialty—Bea Concepcion, Pablo Garcia, Edgar Lerma, Michelle Rheault, and Joel Topf. We plan to continue to lead the way on this initiative, and and we intend that a visual abstract will soon accompany every research article published in CJASN. We are committed to innovation in scientific communication, and to further this goal, we convened three focus groups during Kidney Week, led by Alison Tong, Diedra Crews, and Jane Schell, to understand how young nephrology professionals around the world consume scientific information to allow us to remain at the leading edge of change for the next generation. We anticipate sharing the results and adapting our approach on the basis of the key takeaways from the focus groups.

We have also kept our promise to provide a platform for ideas on the entire breadth of issues that affect the clinical practice of nephrology by launching a new feature: Perspectives. The articles published thus far and in the pipeline include, but are not limited, to perspectives on funding priorities of agencies in the United States, such as the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases and Department of Veterans Affairs; challenges in attracting trainees to our field; physician burnout; transforming the practice of nephrology; and public policy. To maximize the reach of these articles, all Perspectives articles are “open access” and available at no charge.

We believe that the most important and innovative initiative at CJASN thus far is our attempt to incorporate the patient voice. The eventual goal of all biomedical research is to improve the health and wellbeing of patients. Therefore, the truest measure of value for every paper that we publish is its ultimate effect on patient care. Although biomedical journals have routinely solicited the opinions of other researchers on the work that they publish as editorials, most—including CJASN—have never solicited the opinion of patients. To fill this gap, we have nominated three highly engaged patients who have faced the challenge of kidney disease most of their lives as Patient Voice Editors—Paul Conway, Kevin Fowler, and Lori Hartwell. These Patient Voice Editors will help us solicit patients with kidney disease from around the world to write an editorial providing a patient’s perspective on one article that we publish every month. We hope that these editorials will provide valuable feedback to clinicians and researchers on the importance and limitations of nephrology research and what more needs to be done. Each Patient Voice Editor has agreed to author one of the first three monthly articles, and the first editorial appears in this issue of the journal (1).

We at CJASN remain committed to publishing high-quality and impactful clinical and translational research that furthers the goal of improving the health and wellbeing of people living with kidney diseases as judged by both nephrology professionals and patients.

Disclosures

R.M. is the Editor-in-Chief of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). M.C. and I.d.B. are Deputy Editors of CJASN.