With the change in the Journal of Vascular Surgery portfolio to individual Editors-in-Chief with separate associate editorial teams, an opportunity existed to create a distinct editorial board for the Journal of Vascular Surgery Cases, Innovations and Techniques (JVSCIT). This is the first independent board for this journal, with previous membership being comprised of the Journal of Vascular Surgery and Journal of Vascular Surgery: Venous and Lymphatic Disorders board members, and we are excited with the diversity, breadth of experience, past service to the journal, and enthusiasm our newly appointed group brings (Table). We would like to thank the outgoing board members for their dedication to the JVS portfolio by willingly shouldering the additional responsibilities of JVSCIT over our first 5 years. Without you, we could not have achieved what we have in our short existence!
Table.
Journal of Vascular Surgery Cases, Innovations and Techniques
| Editor-in-Chief | |
| Matthew R. Smeds | Saint Louis University |
| Associate Editors | |
| Bernardo C. Mendes | Mayo Clinic |
| Leigh Ann O’Banion | UCSF – Fresno |
| Sherene Shalhub | Oregon Health and Science University |
| Editorial Board | |
| Rana Afifi | University of Texas – Houston |
| Ayman Ahmed | Marshfield Clinic |
| Donald Baril | Cedars Sinai |
| Robert Beaulieu | University of Michigan |
| Saideep Bose | Saint Louis University |
| Jayer Chung | Baylor – Houston |
| Mario D’Oria | Trieste University |
| Yana Etkin | Zucker School of Medicine – Hofstra University |
| Alexander Gombert | European Vascular Center Aachen Maastricht |
| E. John Harris | Stanford University |
| Joseph Hart | Medical College of Wisconsin |
| Arjun Jayaraj | Rane Center for Venous and Lymphatic |
| Sharon Kiang | Loma Linda University |
| Issam Koleilat | Robert Wood Johnson University Barnabas Health |
| Meryl Logan | Central Texas Veterans Health Care |
| G. Matthew Longo | University of Nebraska Medical Center |
| Gregory Magee | University of Southern California |
| Albeir Mousa | West Virginia University |
| Patrick O’Hara | Cleveland Clinic (Retired) |
| Robert Patterson | Brown University |
| Danielle Pineda | Jefferson University |
| Khalil Qato | Southern Illinois University |
| David Rigberg | University of California – Los Angeles |
| Graham Roche-Nagle | University Health Network – Toronoto |
| Jean Marie Ruddy | Medical University of South Carolina |
| Palma Shaw | Upstate Medical University |
| Niten Singh | University of Washington |
| Emily Spangler | University of Alabama Birmingham |
| Britt Tonnessen | Yale University |
| Gian Franco Veraldi | University of Verona |
| Grace Wang | University of Pennsylvania |
| Young Erben | Mayo – Jacksonville |
In order to increase transparency, we thought it was important to provide a review of our methods of editorial board membership selection. Led by our Associate Editor and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer Sherene Shalhub, the selection process began as a blinded assessment of all current reviewers with a focus on the review completion rates (ratio of completed reviews divided by invited reviews), total number of completed reviews, and the average reviewer scores by handling editors (out of a maximum score of 100). After this blinded review had generated a preliminary list of potential board members using these metrics, we unblinded the list to assess gender, geographical, and practice type distribution. We ultimately selected 35 reviewers with outstanding metrics and wonderful diversity to invite to become members, with 32 accepting the appointment. The group included over 30% female members, 15% international members, and 15% members who are in nonacademic practices. Within the representatives from the United States: 20% practice in the West Coast region; 23% in the Midwest; 27% in the South; and 30% on the East Coast. This group had a review completion rate of 91%, an average of 15 manuscripts handled in the past 18 months, and an average reviewer score of 80, which really highlights the applicability of their appointments!
While having a fully inclusive and representative board was one of our goals, and we believe our process has gone a long way in moving us in this direction, we are not quite where we need to be. While we have information on gender and geography of our reviewers, we have just begun to collect volunteer data on our reviewer’s ethnic backgrounds. In future editorial board member selection processes, we hope to include this metric in the evaluation to further ensure diversity within the group. Board members are appointed for a 3-year term and are evaluated yearly, with some terms extended or shortened depending on specific areas of need by the board. This will allow us to re-evaluate the composition on a yearly basis and we hope to continue to evolve as time goes on. In addition to increasing the transparency of editorial board member selection, we also wanted to increase the feedback given to our current reviewers regarding their work with the journal. To this end, we have begun releasing yearly “report cards” containing review metrics so that our reviewers can see their editorial scores and metrics in comparison to editorial board members. While this is not a perfect system, it will provide some important and desired feedback to our reviewer group and hopefully help improve the reviews that are done even more!
JVSCIT is in a great position as we begin 2023. Submissions were up last year compared to previous years, and we continue to receive top quality case reports, videos, innovative techniques, and vascular images. Since our editorial team took over in July of 2022, we have added several article types to the journal, including “How I Do It” articles (did you see those in the December edition?) and “Innovators in Vascular Surgery”, and have expanded our video submissions section and increased our invited commentaries on select papers. We have assigned a dedicated social media editor and have a new presence on Twitter and Instagram (give us a follow at @JVascSurgCIT), with special #JVSCITTweetChats focused on promotion of papers within our journal. We have created an author-centric quarterly podcast with Audible Bleeding that highlights important manuscripts and have begun creating “Virtual Special Issues” focusing on important topics in vascular surgery (look for our first VSI on innovative techniques in the management of CLTI to be released in the first quarter of 2023). We have standardized our table of contents and streamlined our review process and in doing so have decreased our reviewer review time to less than 8 days and the average time to first decision to less than 30 days. We have updated our website (www.jvscit.org) providing more organization to our collections and hopefully allowing readers to find what they are looking for more quickly.
As always, thank you to our readers, authors, reviewers, and editorial board members for your active engagement in keeping JVSCIT the premier journal for original case reports and series, innovative techniques, and vascular images and videos. We always welcome your feedback, and please let us know any suggestions or concerns you have. We look forward to another exciting year of growth!