Reflections and Next Stages for Kidney International Reports

The year 2020 brought a surge of unexpected challenges for nephrology and the medical field in general: the rapid and merciless spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the death of upward of 1 million individuals worldwide from COVID-19 and its related conditions, and the learning curve among medical practitioners to treat sick patients with COVID-19, many of whom suffer complications affecting the kidneys.

Amidst these difficulties came silver linings and positive developments for KI Reports. Perhaps our most notable accomplishment in 2020 was being accepted by Clarivate Analytics in their Journal Citation Reports and assigned our first impact factor of 3.374—an excellent starting point for an open access journal with only 3 full years of publication.

Our editorial content has grown substantially as well; submissions surged by 50% in 2020. This unprecedented increase has resulted in more robust content for the journal, including clinically relevant developments and discussions regarding the treatment of COVID-19 in patients with chronic kidney disease, end-stage renal disease, or other related complications. Our narrative review published in the May issue on the management of transplant and dialysis affected by COVID-19 in Italy¹ is now one of our top-cited articles of all time. Our October 2020 issue featured 6 investigations on COVID-19 and hemodialysis with accompanying commentaries by experts discussing the implications and learning lessons from the findings.

Our editorial team worked furiously throughout the past year to process the surge in article submissions to select the highest-quality and most clinically relevant articles among them for publication, while lending credence to interesting areas of research other than COVID-19 that deserve attention. Consequently, it is unfortunate that we were not able to accept many submissions owing to priority limitations.

Furthermore, for the second year, we published the annual abstracts from the International Society of Nephrology World Congress meeting, which did not occur in person in 2020 and will take place virtually in 2021.

We have initiated a new category of articles titled “Regional Reports” that highlight advances in health care for conditions unique to a country or region. We are proud to continue offering fee waivers to authors from developing nations who lack institutional funding.

Our staff has been active all year long on social media, sharing our latest content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We have worked closely with the marketing team at the International Society of Nephrology (ISN) as well to include highlights from every issue in the ISN newsletters, in addition to monthly audio abstracts now available on the ISN website to members.

Looking forward to 2021, we will continue to strive for editorial excellence by pushing our goals further. We plan to apply for Medline indexing, and if accepted, all articles published in KI Reports would be indexed in PubMed more quickly—when they publish as an article in press rather than in an issue—and would have National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) applied to them. We also plan to expand our editorial staff to help process the increase in submissions.

Finally, we cannot be more thankful to you—our readers, authors, and peer reviewers—for your unprecedented amount of involvement and support. KI Reports has flourished in the past year—a growth spurt that we applaud with humility and gratitude as we transition to another year of publication with continued anticipation, hope, and drive to succeed.

Disclosure

JR is the Editor-in-Chief of KI Reports, is on the data and safety monitoring board of Novartis, is a consultant for and has received research funding from Otsuka, is a consultant for Equillium, is on the steering committee and advisory board of Travere, and is on the advisory board of Reata. SM is the Deputy Editor of KI Reports and is a consultant for and has received grant support from Angion BioMedica. SP is an Associate Editor of KI Reports. RM is the Executive Editor of KI Reports.