The Lung Development, Injury and Repair Gordon Research conference

Dear Associate Editors, Members of the Editorial Board, contributors, colleagues and friends.

I am glad to tell you that Dr. Thomas J. Mariani, distinguished member of the American Journal of Physiology-Lung Cell and Molecular Physiology editorial board will be chairing the Lung Development, Injury and Repair Gordon Research conference next year (see below). This is an outstanding conference and I would urge everybody, especially our younger colleagues, to attend.  You will hear some great science and network with outstanding scientists.  The list of speakers and topics will be published soon.

I did a quick search on PubMed using the terms Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol. AND (Lung Development) AND (2012 OR 2013 OR 2014).  I was gratified to find  153 outstanding articles including the seminal review by our esteemed associate editor, Dr. Rory Morty (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24213917)

Please consider submitting manuscripts on lung development to AJP-Lung.  They will be assigned to Dr. Rory Morty and the reviews will be quick, fair and helpful.  Remember, we are the top rated basic science pulmonary journal based on the h-index (http://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=2740).

With best regards and many thanks

Sadis Matalon

Editor

AJP-Lung 2013 Statistics

I hope you are all well and having a great summer.  I have some very good news: we are ranked number 1 according to H-index (among journals publishing mainly basic science articles. According to Google: “ The h-index is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar (or journal).”  Our impact factor rose from 3.523 to 4.041.  I think these are remarkable achievement and will of course be disseminated to the entire pulmonary community.  The table listing the IF of all APS Journals can be found in http://www.the-aps.org/mm/Publications/Journals/Impact-Factors.html

The big challenge right now is to keep our momentum for next year.  Honestly this is daunting task.  Please, consider submitting some of the outstanding articles from your laboratory to AJP-Lung.  Thanks to the diligence and excellence of our Associate Editors and our Editorial Board, they will be reviewed fairly and rapidly (please see our statistics below).  Furthermore, as many contributors can testify the reviews are always helpful and improve the impact of their articles.  The expectation for my first term as editor (which expires on January 1^st, 2015) is that each member of the editorial board accepted at least 50% of the requests to review manuscripts and published at least one original article. 

Other statistics: # of manuscripts and rejection rates.

All manuscripts 1/1/2013-12/31/2013

Article type	submitted	Accepted	Rejected	Major Rev,	Minor Rev.	Withdrawn	% Rejected
Editorial	5	5	0	0	0	0	0
Editorial Focus	8	8	0	0	0	0	0
Innovative Methodology	3	3	0	0	0	0	0
Letter to the Editor	1	1	0	0	0	0	0
Perspectives	7	5	0	0	0	2	0
Research Articles	337	168	164	0	0	5	49
Review Articles	10	10	0	0	0	0	0
Total	371	200	164	0	0	7

 Final Versions of all manucsripts submitted in 2013

Article type	submitted	Accepted	Rejected	Rejected with Referral	Major Rev,	Minor Rev.	% Rejected	% Rejected with Referral
Editorial	1	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
Editorial Focus	5	5	0	0	0	0	0	0
Historical Article	7	6	1	0	0	0	14	0
Innovative Methodology	3	1	2	0	0	0	67	0
Letter to the Editor	1	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
Perspectives	5	4	1	0	1	0	20	0
PIM Review	3	3	0	0	0	0	0	0
Reply LTE	1	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
Research Articles	291	167	94	15	5	2	32	9
Review Article	15	10	3	2	0	0	20	20
Total	332	199	101	17	6	2	30	9

                                             

Rejection rates for research manuscripts were as follows:

 201=37.45%; 2012= 48%. 

Times for first decision as well as final decision for revised manuscripts are shown below.  I am very glad to tell you that the average time to make a decision in a revised manuscript dropped from 13.32 days in in 2012 to 10.3 days in 2013.

Time from EIC/AE notification to decision 2012, 2013:

Query 2012

Time from EIC notification to decision sent to author

First Decision average  22.91

Time from AE Acceptance (Revision) to decision sent to author

Time to Revision Decision  13.32 

Query 2013 

Time from EIC notification to decision sent to author

First Decision average  21.97

Time from AE Acceptance (Revision) to decision sent to author

Time to Revision Decision  10.30

We need ideas for reviews and calls for papers.  Some to the call for papers have been extremely successful.  We need to keep trying and rotate them to keep readers interested.  Most important we need you to contribute manuscripts and reviews to your journal.  It is my hope that our impact factor and h-index will continue to increase.  Of course this reflects the excellence of the published articles.

I look forward to being busier and busier and complaining that I have too many papers to assign.  Please make this happen

With best regards

Sadis