The Journal Stroke: A Journal of Cerebral Circulation is the premier journal for all basic, translational, and clinical investigations of all aspects regarding disorders of the cerebral circulation. The last 50 years have provided a terrific foundation to build upon and this would also be an exciting time to go from great to exceptional. I am excited to start my term as the new Editor-in-Chief, and my vision would be to make Stroke an indispensable, inspiring, and trusted source of high-quality scientific knowledge for all disciplines involved in disorders of the cerebral circulation. Stroke needs to drive innovative interdisciplinary research, influence patient care, and enhance our understanding of disorders of the cerebral circulation.
The mission of the journal is much broader than in the past and goes beyond the publication of printed material. Regardless of the content of the articles published in Stroke, all basic, translational, clinical and population science publications need to be supported, enhanced and disseminated to broaden the impact of Stroke. We need to find innovative ways to highlight the interplay between disciplines such that clinicians will understand the latest breakthroughs at the bench and basic scientists will hear about the gaps in clinical treatments. The content to influence the field needs to be more broadly disseminated thru online offerings, social media channels, and multi-media presentations in audio, video and more. We need to take full advantage of the AHA family of journals to build collaborative bridges of influence, reinforce synergistic messages, and communicate across disciplines about all aspects regarding stroke.
Strengths and Opportunities
The current strengths of the journal are the high-global impact on the field across multiple success metrics, high-quality of the articles published in the journal across basic, translational and clinical science, and the international representativeness of the editorial board, authorship, and readership. Potential threats are the challenges to remain relevant to a wider audience, the growing number of competing international journals, the rising demands for open access publishing, the language barriers that impair global accessibility, the speed and volume of knowledge generation, and the requirement to disseminate greater amounts of research more quickly and succinctly across innovative communication channels.
The key opportunities for Stroke are to advance our rank in the list of neurology and peripheral vascular disease journals and continue to excel as the global leader in the field of stroke. Our strategic goals will require us to effectively engage multiple disciplines, broaden our scope to new topic areas, encourage interdisciplinary science, accelerate research to lead to better care for stroke patients, be the go-to-place for the latest information about the field, leverage the collaborative power of the AHA Journals, evolve in the changing publishing environment with more open science, and more effectively engage international audiences. To advance our mission, we would continue to assure that Stroke succeeds across all metrics with the right mix of high-impact publications across disciplines. We will embark on expansion of the editorial board to add breadth, increase the representation of women and diverse members on the board, and broaden international engagement.
Stroke will need to evolve to broaden sections to include new topics such as Diagnosis, Nursing Science, Clinical Trials, Emergency medicine, Implementation Science, Quality Improvement, Digital Health; expand online relevant offerings; encourage more interdisciplinary articles; and markedly enrich our social media presence with video, podcasts, and images. As we expand the disciplines involved in Stroke, we will need to use the broader editorial board to engage the other disciplines by inviting authors for special articles, soliciting papers from other meetings that continue to include stroke science, and directly appealing to the leadership of other organizations to get manuscripts sent to Stroke. We also need to make sure we find more novel ways to package byte-size information and get it rapidly and broadly disseminated as well as properly translated so it is understood across disciplines.
Establishing the New Editorial Team
Over the last few months, we have begun to establish the new editorial leadership team to help lead the journal for the next 5 years. I am determined to enhance equity, diversity and inclusion in the masthead of Stroke. In 2018, only 29% of the Stroke editorial Board were women. Clearly, we need to do much better at getting many more women actively engaged in the leadership of the editorial board.1 My goal would be to attain 50% representation of women on the editorial board. This will take some time, but we are already making progress with 6 women among the 14 editorial leaders of the journal. (Table 1) We also are setting a goal to maintain 50% international engagement and increase the race and ethnic diversity of our editorial board.
Table 1.
Stroke Editorial Leadership Team, 2020
| Editor-In-Chief | Ralph Sacco | |
| Deputy Editor | Argye Hillis | |
| Associate Editors | Clinical | Seemant Chaturvedi (Asst E, 4y) |
| Science | Charlotte Cordonnier (I, France Ed B) | |
| Pooja Khatri (Ed B; Asst E 1y) | ||
| Jennifer Majersik (Ed B) | ||
| Bruce Obviagele (Asst E 6y) | ||
| Bernard Yan (I, Aust, Interventional) | ||
| Basic | Johannes Boltze (I, Ed B, UK, Germany) | |
| Science | Miguel Perez-Pinzon (Asst Ed, 10) | |
| Population | Eric Smith (I, Canada, Asst Ed 10) | |
| Science | Natalia Rost (cur Asst E) | |
| Senior | Marc Fisher | |
| Consulting Editors | Karen Furie |
Besides sex, race-ethnicity, career level, and international origin, we will need to establish an editorial board that has a broad expertise across many disciplines that represent the science of Stroke. The assistant editors and section editors are a great way to make sure various disciplines and expertise are well-covered. Once we have a senior editorial leadership team in place, we would work together to appoint the section editors and full editorial board aiming to have adequate representation across disciplines. Starting with the current editorial board members, authors of articles in Stroke, and other leaders in the field, I would plan a call for nominations of new candidates to the editorial board with an increased focus on under-represented candidates and women. The Editorial Leadership team could serve as a nominations committee to help sort thru nominations to get the most representative slate. We also need to increase the number of statistical and methodological reviewers to assure that scientific rigor is maintained.
Change is never easy, but I view the change in editorial staff as a critical step to bringing in new leadership and ideas and helping to forge a path forward. Getting the new team in place to help collectively establish some strategic goals and develop an effective working relationship will be an important initial step. Strategic goals and initiatives for Stroke that we are considering over the next decade are still under development and are enumerated below. (Table 2)
Table 2:
Proposed Sections for Stroke
| Brain Health (Vascular Cognitive Impairment) |
| Critical Care |
| Diagnosis and Imaging |
| Digital Health (Health IT) |
| Emergency Medicine |
| Epidemiology, Outcomes, and Population Science |
| Genetics, Genomics, Precision Medicine |
| Health Policy and Health Services Delivery |
| Implementation Science |
| Nursing Science |
| Neuro-cardiology |
| Quality Improvement |
| Recovery and Rehabilitation |
| Surgery (Vascular and Neurosurgery) |
| Translational Interdisciplinary Science |
| Treatments – Interventional |
| Treatments – Emerging |
| Treatments – Preventive |
| Treatments in Development |
| Controversies and Debates |
| Clinical Trials |
| Evidence-based Guidelines |
| Stroke Lit Reviews, Basic Science |
| Stroke Lit Reviews, Clinical Science |
| Illustrative Teaching Cases |
| Stroke Early Career & Training |
| Stroke History and Leadership Profiles |
| Blogging Stroke |
| Social Media |
Charting a New Course: Strategic Goals, Plans and Initiatives
Extend the influence of Stroke and fully engage across multiple stroke disciplines
Stroke needs to be the leading source of information to influence multiple disciplines. The readership of Stroke is an international multidisciplinary audience that includes anesthesiology, critical care medicine, emergency medicine, epidemiology, internal medicine, neurology, neuro-ophthalmology, neuropathology, neuropsychology, neurosurgery, nuclear medicine, nursing, radiology, rehabilitation, speech pathology, vascular physiology, and vascular surgery. Academics, researchers, basic and translational scientists, stroke clinicians, members of the Stroke Professional Organizations, and trainees represent the broad readership of Stroke. There are also reader groups who need to be expanded and better engaged including those in emergency medicine, pre-hospital care, interventional treatment, behavioral health, neuropsychology, rehabilitation, nursing, implementation science, healthcare policy, and quality improvement.
Starting with the associate editors, we will expand the expertise from clinical and basic to also include population science and genetics. We also need to review and expand the section editors to cover a greater breadth of topics. The section editors are an important way to make sure we have broad representation of the many disciplines that make up the readership of Stroke. The sections provide a way to engage thought leaders in these topic areas to feed new ideas to the editorial staff to help make sure Stroke is always on the cutting edge of innovation. Some proposed modifications to the Sections are listed in Table 3.
Table 3:
Strategic Incentive Goals for Stroke
| Enhance Journal Standing in the Field |
|
| Improve Gender Equity on Stroke Editorial Boar |
| Attain 50% representation of women in editorial leadership by July 1, 2021 |
| Increase women representation on the editorial board to 50% (currently 29%) by July 1, 2024 |
| Improve Manuscript Review Processing |
| Reduce time to first decision to 18 days or less |
| Increase Quality of Original Articles |
| Reduce acceptance rate to 12% by July 1, 2021 and maintain or lower for duration of term. |
| Extend the Reach of Stroke Publications |
| Establish podcasts and visual abstracts for selected clinical articles and selected review articles by July 1, 2021 and maintain schedule for remainder of term. |
Utilize innovative article types to bundle knowledge to more effectively communicate information
We are embarking on a comprehensive review of each of the current article types to evaluate their impact (citations, zero citations, altmetrics) and help guide future content. New article types could be piloted such as interdisciplinary science reports that involve results across disciplines. Given the impact of guidelines, invited topical reviews, meta-analyses, and clinical trials, we are planning to expand these articles in the journal. For basic science, we need to highlight what is exciting and make these understandable to the readership regardless of area of expertise. We need to increase the use and distribution of the visual abstract for original articles to provide readers with a summary of the study in a form that facilitates dissemination in presentations and highlights new findings and clinical implications.
Stimulate transdisciplinary collaborative thinking across thematic areas
We need to have content relevant to the broad interests of our community, as well as focus on translating research across disciplines to stimulate more interdisciplinary collaboration. Whenever possible, key messages from original research need to be made understandable across disciplines. The Editors Picks need to provide crystalized summaries for all readers to hear the key messages for articles published in the journal, the section entitled “Basic Science Advances for Clinicians” should be expanded, and there could even be a section of Key Messages, or highlights from the current issue to provide a brief synopsis of articles tailored to all readers. Combining across basic and clinical reports would help foster more interdisciplinary team science. We are hoping to increase the use of invited Focused Updates with an increased emphasis on including basic and clinical science articles within the update to better highlight interdisciplinary science. Moreover, the consideration of a call for articles on a thematic topic can provide a way to focus attention on a topic across a variety of perspectives. Better engagement across Circulation, Hypertension, JAHA other AHA journals would increase cross-talk, sharing of articles, and cross-promotion of publications to drive attention to stroke-related articles in AHA journals.
Expand high-quality original research and invited reviews
Stroke must actively go after the high-profile studies such as clinical trials and other manuscripts from high-impact research groups. We need to incentivize authors to submit their high-profile research to our journal and convince them of the higher impact with more media coverage, broader dissemination across the AHA journals, and wider social media communications. Many trials are often presented at ISC, yet published in other journals. We need to actively reach out to investigators during the conduct of these high-impact trials. We need to coordinate publication embargo dates, as well as dissemination in the journal’s social media and public venues that are attractive to clinical trial steering committees. We should consider offering publication of clinical trial methods papers, perhaps in a Stroke spinoff journal, as a way to get them to publish the main trial results in our journals. We can reach out to trial coordination groups such as NINDS StrokeNet to offer publishing insights to PIs. Similar to the NEJM, providing some follow-up correspondence to authors about the impact of their articles will incentivize them to submit other future manuscripts. We need to compete with Lancet Neurology for highly cited review articles and sub-studies from major clinical trials by reaching out to the investigative teams.
More rapidly and broadly disseminate breaking information in the field
Stroke needs to takes advantage of all of the breaking news presented at scientific meetings and fully promote publications through AHA Science News. We plan to increase our solicitation of articles from authors of top scored abstracts at ISC and other meetings to be a magnet to draw interesting high-profile science. We also need to make sure clinical trials that can influence practice are given a high-profile and expedited review in the journal. Although it takes extra logistics and timing, having simultaneous publications around the time of a meeting can maximize media attention. We are planning to increase these efforts to accomplish this at the International Stroke Conference, AHA Sessions, and other stroke meetings. We also will increase the number of press releases on relevant articles published in stroke each month to drive brand awareness and education about breakthroughs in the field and fully utilize AHA Science News.
Ignite interest in Stroke across stakeholders through innovative communication portals
To extend our influence we need to fully utilize the innovative ways of spreading information. Younger audiences access information differently in compressed pieces across multiple digital platforms with connected interactive formats. We need major enhancements in social media, digital publications, website, and online activity to drive attention and widen the influence of Stroke. We are planning to launch Stroke Podcasts, interviews, videos, QuickTakes (video abstracts), and clinical review audio. We need to increase short video summaries of selected publications such as the Editor-Picks and other Stroke articles such as Focused Updates, Reviews or Opinions. Launched by Stroke in 2013, Blogging Stroke highlights high-impact published studies. Blog posts are written mainly by stroke fellows and early career researchers and foster the engagement of young professionals. We will merge our Stroke Bloggers and expand our social media editors and increase the number who are blogging and tweeting (@StrokeAHA_ASA), as well as Twitter chats and Journal Clubs, to make sure we effectively increase awareness about important news from the journal. We will launch Stroke Instagram to more widely disseminate images, figures, videos, and visual abstracts of journal articles. We need to improve the look and accessibility of email push updates for Stroke Editor’s Picks, highlights, and articles with editorials. Using the Stroke bloggers, twitter, facebook, Instagram, podcasts, short videos, and social media editorial members, we can more actively drive interest through these channels.
Expand online educational content to improve the quality of patient-centered stroke care
We need to better engage practicing healthcare professionals and advanced practice providers in the readership of Stroke with online content to improve the quality of stroke care. We need to evaluate and expand the CME activity provided with articles for healthcare professionals including advanced practice providers. We need to better provide links to resources to help clinicians certify for professional responsibilities such as CME for Continuing Certification, NIH Stroke Scale Certifications, Modified Rankin Certification, and other AHA training opportunities. We will also continue to expand the online Illustrative Teaching Cases section that can help improve best clinical practices. We will consider launching some new clinical sections: (1) Stroke Images that includes interesting images to illustrate emerging stroke issues; (2) Stroke Patient Page that has a one-page teaching illustration that a clinician could pull down from the website to illustrate something clinical to a patient; and (3) Stroke Simulations that are case based online programs with virtual interactive formats similar to the CME programs at bit.ly/strokesimulation
Advance career development for younger stroke trainees and professionals
It is critical that Stroke engage early career professionals and make advancing career development for younger stroke trainees and professionals a major priority in the strategic goals of the journal. Stroke has a number of activities that have engaged early professionals. Some programs that could be expanded include: (1) Stroke Bloggers and Social Media teams that engage young professionals to disseminate opinions about Stroke content and meetings; (2) InterSECT (International Stroke Early Career & Training) - the online section that provides content to stimulate early career development. It addresses an international audience, and could be expanded across all segments and also include laboratory scientists. We would also seek to disseminate some of the material that is aimed at career development of stroke fellows and generated by NINDS StrokeNET; (3) Trainee Reviewers to get trainees engaged in peer-review and educate them about scientific method and peer review; (4) Workshops to engage early career professionals at annual meetings to improve their understanding and skills regarding scientific writing, review, and publishing; and (5) Connecting and expanding the AHA/ASA Fellows In Training (FIT) programs.
Channel important professional news and information about stroke
We need to help integrate news about other external influences such as research funding (NIH Stroke NET), political issues, healthcare administration, and other topics that could affect our stakeholders. Potential innovations in Stroke Content, Topic Areas and Sections of mainly digital content additions could include: (1) Perspectives – Invited short reports on some highlight in Health Policy or other high-profile topic relevant to the field of stroke; (2) AHA/ASA News – Online highlights from the AHA/ASA and links to AHA Professional Heart Daily; (3) International News – Some updates from other organizations such as ESO, WSO etc.; (4) Stroke Leadership Profiles – profiles of scientific leaders in the field. These interview format articles can be informative about history and perspectives and be inspiring particularly to young trainees; and (5) NINDS News that includes highlights on ongoing trials and NIH-funded research.
It will be critical to work closely with the Stroke Council. We need to hear about major Council issues, understand the progress on scientific statements and evidence-based guidelines, have bi-directional communication with the Council on any scientific hot topics and controversies, utilize the Council leadership as a sounding board for any new initiatives, and make sure that the educational, training, and mentorship activities are synchronized with the Council.
Continue to be the international voice of stroke knowledge
Stroke attracts an international audience, publishes outstanding research from international scientists, and engages international leaders on the editorial board. In 2019, 75% of the 3428 total manuscripts submitted and 66% of the accepted original research manuscripts were from outside the US. In 2018, 54% of the editorial board members were from outside the US. We need to continue our international engagement. We would maintain the strong international presence on the editorial board aiming for 50% representation. We would also formally appoint some of our international editorial board members to an international ambassador program, provide them recognition on the masthead, and empower them to be advocates for the journal locally. We need to translate and disseminate our best articles in international editions of Stroke. These editions usually require sponsorship and could be considered with the help of international champions to help spread the work about Stroke internationally. The journal needs to have leadership ambassadors maintain a presence at key international meetings, solicit the best science from international meetings, and utilize international communication channels and social media networks to spread the news from Stroke including translated podcasts and short articles to drive awareness. Translations of important articles would be critical to spread influence and national stroke organizations are often willing to help. Young international professionals can also be a great source of help to spread the social media for Stroke.
Maintain rigorous quality standards
Rigorous quality standards will continue to be a priority for Stroke. The same rigorous peer-review standards need to be applied to all articles regardless of their origin. Quality standards need to be systematically applied and systems implemented to track and improve compliance. Specific policies regarding the conduct of research need to be followed such as informed consent, ethical conduct of research, reporting in clinicaltrials.gov, pre-registration of studies and analysis plans, handling conflicts of interest, and following rigorous guidelines for conducting basic and clinical research. Other specific AHA Journal policies need to be monitored and maintained (https://www.ahajournals.org/research-guidelines). We will add a Technical Editor to help adhere to these rigorous quality standards and implement various checklists to provide quality control and auditing of manuscript submissions. Adherence to strong research design and statistical standards are also important to assuring high quality. Stroke has had a Statistical Editor and utilized ad hoc statistical reviewers, methodologists, as well as paid statistical consultant reviewers. I would plan to expand the use of statistical reviewers and methodologists for certain articles to assure high quality standards are uniformly applied.
Transparency and openness will continue to be a high priority to more rapidly disseminate knowledge, accelerate treatment discoveries, and improve the delivery of high-quality science. There are AHA Journal quality standards that must be followed to maintain Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP). TOP standards allow authors to “indicate whether the data, methods used in the analysis, and materials used to conduct the research will be made available to any researcher for purposes of reproducing the results or replicating the procedure.” The AHA maintains a list of potential data repositories.2
There is an increasing demand for more open science, data transparency, and reproducibility. Working within the scope of the AHA Scientific Publishing committee, we need to leverage resources across the journals to efficiently meet these challenges. Utilizing the available data repositories, publishing open access articles within the AHA journals or in JAHA, and following the quality standards and policies as mentioned above would be critical to maintain and advance.
Measure, monitor and advance our key success metrics
Many metrics are utilized in scientific publishing to measure success and each have their specific strengths and weaknesses. We would have to decide which metrics are best to track and develop the strategies to improve these metrics. We need to focus on the best and most important metrics to track in terms of influencing science, knowledge, and innovation in the field. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) remains a widely used measure and frequently cited proxy of journal quality and is based on the average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. It depends on the number of citations in a given year of articles from the journal over the last 2 years and is also dependent on the number of qualified publications in the journal over that time period. In 2018, Stroke had a JIF of 6.046, but has only risen from 5.7 in 2010. This compared very favorably to other journals in our field (Int J Stroke 4.466, CVD 2.681) as well as other neurology journals (Neurology 8.689), but is far from the industry leaders (NEJM 70.670; Lancet 59.102, JAMA 51.273, Circulation 23.054). Using JIF, Stroke ranks 20/199 among clinical neurology journals, 5/65 for peripheral vascular disease journals, and 7/12 among AHA Journals. Although there are limitations with the JIF that threaten its validity as the single proxy of journal performance, Web of Science, many professional organizations, and authors utilize this metric when determining journal rankings and where to publish. Therefore, we need to include it as one of our metrics and develop strategies to increase our rankings.
While we would have to include JIF among our metrics, it should not be the main measure. Stroke is second only to Circulation in terms of the number of cites per year in 2018 with 64,814 versus 166,484 among AHA Journals. The Eigenfactor is an innovative measure that measures the influence of a journal on the scientific community and accounts for the number of articles published as well as citations. Although the Eigenfactor score is used less often, it could be of interest to include in the Stroke metric dashboard. Stroke has an Eigenfactor score of 0.082630, normalized Eigenfactor score of 9.8 (Stroke has 9.8 times the influence of the average journal score).
Traditional publication metrics are inadequate to measure influence. There are other metrics that indicate the societal impact of Stroke including total cites, media impressions, article downloads, online visits, and Twitter mentions. Altmetrics (alternative supplemental impact metrics) is a rapidly growing way to assess impact utilizing new methods of communication and may be a better measure of impact for Stroke. The score is based on the weighted measures of impact of an article in the news, blogs, Q&A forums, Twitter, Google+, Facebook and other sources. Using this measure, the average past 6-month average score for Stroke was 44.55 and rising.
At present, my choice for key success metrics would be the 2-year Journal Impact Factor, the normalized eigenfactor, the total cites, and the Altmetrics score. The journal will develop an annual dashboard across a variety of impact, influence and performance metrics and all editorial board members should understand and take responsibility for the quality improvement metrics. We will publish and widely disseminate an annual Stroke metric pictograph to display the impact of the journal in terms of these metrics to demonstrate and market the influence on the field. (Figure 1)
Figure 1:
Draft Info-metric of Impact of Stroke
Consider Stroke spinoff journals
As our stroke discipline continues to expand, it becomes more difficult to remain responsive and relevant to a wider audience including publishing enough scientific content. The more we publish, the more chance we can influence our field, allow our scientific disciplines a vehicle to disseminate knowledge, and help develop the careers of our young professionals. Increasing our content, however, can threaten success metrics such as the JIF by adding to the denominator articles that get very few citations. We need to keep these disciplines engaged with Stroke and our organizations. Cascading journals within the AHA Journals is an effective way to keep high-quality submitted manuscripts within the family especially when the acceptance rate ranges from 9% to 16%. At present, we refer a number of articles to JAHA and Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, but as Stroke submissions increase and the field grows, we may need to consider whether the time is right to develop an open access Stroke spinoff. These decisions would require an analysis of the number and quality of articles currently submitted to Stroke on these topics and market analysis regarding competitive landscape and demand.
Engage in coopetition (collaboration and competition)
Although there are other stroke and neurology competitive journals, Stroke can continue to differentiate itself with the high-quality basic and translational science that is less frequently published in these journals. Given the expanded interest in some of the new sections including brain health, we will need to differentiate ourselves from others with papers in emerging areas. Working with the AHA Journal network provides a distinct advantage for Stroke. Many of the competitive journals do not have the same bandwidth and access to other disciplines like Stroke has being part of the AHA Journal family. There is tremendous power through the combined AHA journals to share best practices, co-promote articles, synergistically influence science and practice, and collaboratively expand mutually reinforcing social media communications. We also can keep the best manuscripts that may just miss publication in Stroke get evaluated for publication in JAHA and other AHA journals. We need to make sure more manuscripts are referred to JAHA for consideration and continually educate the editorial board about the merits of cascading manuscripts across the AHA. I would also encourage the referral of manuscripts from other journals to Stroke particularly Circulation, Hypertension and ATVB.
We also need to open communication and dialogue with other editors in the field. Having worked closely with the other leaders who hold these positions, I feel confident that there are advantages to keeping an open communication portal to build trust and establish collegial working relationships. Working across organizations such as the AAN, WSO, ESO, and SVIN would be important to maintain connections and communications. I believe it is always best for the field to build collaborative bridges rather than walls.
Improve operational performance
Part of our strategic goals will also be a complete review of the editorial operations of handling manuscript submissions, sharing best practices from other journals, and developing a collaborative working relationship among all of the leaders of the journal. We would plan to thoroughly review the peer review process, the use of trainee reviewers, add a technical editor to standardize publications, consider the need for standard approaches for statistical reviews, and review the current online systems used to select reviewers. Some data mining of the manuscripts that are processed at Stroke would be helpful including: quality of manuscripts accepted, analyses of the most highly-cited articles, types of articles rejected as well as zero cited articles, processing time for review and publication, and ideas to accelerate the time to publish. Other review times will also need to be evaluated and improved. Review time from submission to first decision is currently at 21.5 days and needs to be reduced to 18 days. Reviewers are responding quickly with only 8.6 days between reviewer assignment and review return. We would institute more online training modules for the editorial board and clear enumeration of responsibilities and expectations as an editorial board member. Performance metrics that would need to be tracked would be review turn-around times and editorial board decision times to guide process improvement. Turn-around time for review and decisions need to be accelerated. We also need to review and improve all post review activities to reduce the time from acceptance to publication without compromising accuracy and quality.
Since submissions have risen 15% from 2015–18, some changes in the review operations may be needed to accelerate cycle times and reduce the delays between submission and publishing of high-quality science while maintaining credibility and accuracy. In order to improve workflow and avoid editorial burnout, I believe we need more “triage review” (rapid short reviews by the editorial board) and likely an increased proportion of reject without full review. Present Stroke metrics indicate that only 22% (584 of 2563) of the original research manuscripts are rejected without review, but 55% (1413 of 2563) are rejected after review, and the overall acceptance rate is 15.8%. We would need to re-educate the editorial board about the current metrics and aim for approximately 33–40% of manuscripts in the reject without full review, however, providing some brief feedback to authors in the form of a triage review could still be very helpful. We need to communicate to authors the reasons for this policy change and the goal to accelerate turn-around and avoid delays in the editorial review for manuscripts. If we launch a spinoff journal, there could be opportunities to still capture these manuscript submissions in another AHA journal.
Concluding Comments
I have outlined some strategic ideas and tactics that I would bring to the position as Editor-In-Chief, but I want to emphasize that my leadership style has always been one to embrace teamwork, collaborate, build trust, develop a consensus, and distribute and share responsibilities. These may be some of my own initial ideas, but I would view these all as draft concepts to start a discussion and help move us forward. Stroke has a 50 year legacy and the future remains bright. A quote from the successful innovator Henry Ford sums up our Stroke vision for the next decade: “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
Acknowledgments
Dr. Sacco has received support from the AHA as Senior Consulting Editor for Stroke and grants from the NIH and Florida Department of Health outside the submitted work.
REFERENCES
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