The year 2018 has been a successful one for ASTRO's Advances in Radiation Oncology. As we enter our third year of publishing, submissions are continuing to increase across a wide range of interdisciplinary topics. Advances is currently on target to receive over 200 submissions this year, a roughly 50% increase over 2017. Because of the hard work of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) membership in serving as peer reviewers, our time to first decision has declined to only 38 days. Advances was indexed in PubMed Central in 2017. Although we have yet to receive an impact factor, our Citescore stood at 0.70 in July 2018.
Over the last year, the single biggest area of growth in manuscript submissions to Advances has been in manuscripts involving multiple disease sites or multidisciplinary studies, such as immunotherapy and radiation oncology (Table 1). Our new cover reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the science published in Advances. A special edition on immunotherapy and radiation oncology, edited by Sophia Bornstein and Sharad Goyal, is planned for release at the time of the ASTRO annual meeting. Advances continues to place a strong focus on the use of social media in radiation oncology (Fig 1). “Social media for radiation oncologists: A practical primer,” by Bibault et al,1 published in 2017, remains our most frequently read and downloaded article.
Table 1.
Submissions by malignant disease site to ASTRO’s Advances in January to June 2018
| Section | No. of submissions |
|---|---|
| Biology | 2 |
| Breast | 11 |
| CNS | 8 |
| GI | 5 |
| GU | 10 |
| GYN | 0 |
| H&N | 2 |
| Hematologic | 2 |
| Pediatric | 2 |
| Sarcoma | 1 |
| Thoracic | 10 |
| Other | 28 |
| Physics | 15 |
Abbreviations: CNS = central nervous system; GI = gastrointestinal; GU = genitourinary; GYN = gynecologic; H&N = head and neck.
Figure 1.
Chart illustrating Advances' growth in terms of published articles and related social media attention.
Physics-related manuscripts make up the second largest category. “Viability of Noncoplanar VMAT for liver SBRT compared with coplanar VMAT and beam orientation optimized 4π IMRT,”2 published in 2016 and included in this handout, has received 11 citations and is the most cited paper to date in Advances.
As shown in Figure 2, Advances has a global audience. As an open-access journal, our content is freely available to researchers and doctors around the world and, importantly, is available directly to our patients and their advocates. ASTRO's adoption of an open-access publishing model provides our professional society with a sustainable publishing model positioned to thrive in a changing digital environment while independently creating a resource for educating our patients that did not previously exist.
Figure 2.
Indication of worldwide usage for this journal at the country level.
Footnotes
Conflict of interest: none.
References
- 1.Bibault J.-E., Katz M.S., Motwani S. Social media for radiation oncologists: A practical primer. Adv Radiat Oncol. 2017;2:277–280. doi: 10.1016/j.adro.2017.04.009. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 2.Woods K., Nguyen D., Tran A. Viability of noncoplanar VMAT for liver SBRT compared with coplanar VMAT and beam orientation optimized 4π IMRT. Adv Radiat Oncol. 2016;1:67–75. doi: 10.1016/j.adro.2015.12.004. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]