Return to Normalcy

This year represents a relative return to normalcy after over 2 years of pandemic-related disruptions in clinical and surgical care and meetings. Last week’s American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons Annual Meeting set a record for attendance and was a welcome return to normalcy, without COVID testing and masking and largely virtual attendance. Jeremy Gilliland, MD, and the rest of the program committee deserve great kudos for putting together such an informative and interactive meeting. The resident hands-on and didactic and case discussion courses were a terrific hit, with more registrants than could be accommodated. Thanks to Dr. Scott Sporer and Dr. Sara J. Shippe Wallace, as well as the faculty volunteers, who put on a great course, with outstanding presentations and discussions.

Congratulations to Dr. Matthew Bullock, DO, MPT, and Dr. Nicholas Brown, MD, for their selection as Co-Reviewers of the Year for Arthroplasty Today. They tied for number of reviews, time to accept review assignments, time to complete reviews, and quality of reviews. We all benefit from the quality, timely reviews from our reviewers, which invariably lead to better publications. As a result of the continuous quality improvement in our journal, our CiteScore is up to 2.0, and our time to first decision continues to decline. We have submitted our application for Clarivate indexing and expect a favorable outcome, due to the collaborative effort of the reviewers, editorial board, and the great staff at Elsevier and American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons and of course the excellent work of Taylor Bowen, who does an amazing job of managing our peer review process.

We are transitioning to an article numbering format, for ease in citation and assembly of articles into our bimonthly issues. This removes page numbers from the citations and allows quicker access to accepted articles and citations. I am also excited to report that we have a new incentive to publish in Arthroplasty Today. For authors who publish 2 articles in a calendar year, the article publishing fee will be waived for the third accepted article.

Thanks to Anna Cohen-Rosenblum, MD, MSc, our social media editor, for her dedicated work with our social media presence. We are now up to over 5800 followers on Twitter, with monthly growth, due to her provocative posts.

This issue is full of excellent articles, including the article of Ledford et al. on immersive virtual reality as an adjunct to anesthesia for conversion total joint arthroplasty [1]. In addition, there is an interesting report of taper failure in revision knee implants, with magnetic resonance imaging diagnosis as well as surgical pearls by Yeramosu et al. [2]. Another article by Rishi et al. provides insight into the biological response to wound irrigation solutions in healthy compared to infected tissues [3].

We are all challenged currently by staffing issues and, to a lesser extent, supply chain disruptions, but I am heartened by the prospects for the future of our specialty, which is arguably one of the most impactful and value-driven arenas in all of health care. Returning from a highly successful in-person meeting has energized me for the coming months, and I look forward to a continued return to normalcy in our daily practices and educational events.

Conflicts of interest

Dr. Golladay receives royalties from Stryker, Inc.; receives financial or material support from American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons (AAHKS); is in the editorial or governing board of Arthroplasty Today and Journal of Arthroplasty; and is a member of the AAHKS Publications Committee and Virginia Orthopaedic Society.

For full disclosure statements refer to https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artd.2022.11.002.