JAMA Surgery 2016 Year in Review

2016 has been an exciting year for JAMA Surgery. As Editor in Chief, I would like to convey some of our accomplishments to the readers, authors, and peer reviewers of the journal. First, as evidence of the high-quality publications in JAMA Surgery, the Impact Factor rose significantly from 4.4 to 5.7. This accomplishment reflects the hard work of our authors, the peer reviewers, and the editorial team. The 2015 Impact Factor of 5.7 positions JAMA Surgery as the number 2 ranked general surgery journal, a tremendous accomplishment. Second, an important goal for JAMA Surgery was to reduce the time from acceptance to online publication. We have succeeded with our goal, with the time from acceptance to online publication averaging 2.5 months for 2016 (Table). We accomplished this goal while preserving our overall acceptance rate, which was 22.7% for 2016. Acceptance rate for Original Investigations was 11.4% and for Research Letters was 27.6%. We are also happy to report that the overall number of submissions has increased by 3.3% from 2015 to 2016, a continuing trend. An initiative that helped us to reduce the time from acceptance to online publication was the adoption of onlineonly articles. In 2016, JAMA Surgery began publishing 2 Original Investigations each month as online only. Another accomplishment we are happy to share is our extended reach through social media. Amalia Cochran, MD, our Web and Social Media Editor, has led the charge to increase our presence on Twitter and Facebook. We currently have 15 600 Twitter followers and 14 793 Facebook likes. JAMA Surgery has 54% (27 articles) of the top 50 articles in Altmetric scores (among the top 4 surgery journals in terms of Impact Factor), including the number 1 article and 5 of the top 10. Combined with the visits to our website, the electronic Table of Contents, and our print distribution, JAMA Surgery reaches more than 50 000 individuals each week. 2016 has been the year of consistent implementation of our new article types. Under the leadership of Gerard Doherty, MD, the Review Editor, JAMA Surgery now publishes an evidencebased review on common topics of interest to our readers each month. Under the leadership of Justin Dimick, MD, the Surgical Innovation Editor, the journal publishes 1 Surgical Innovation article each month. Most recently, JAMA Surgery, along with the entire JAMA Network, unveiled a new website. This website has been designed with the reader in mind. Content is displayed in a more user-friendly manner and tailored to the device being used to access the website. Last, I would like to thank the readers, authors, peer reviewers, and editorial board for contributing to the journal. Through your support, we aim to fulfill our mission “to promote the art and science of surgery by publishing relevant peer-reviewed research to assist the surgeon in optimizing patient care” and to “serve as a forum for the discussion of issues pertinent to surgery, such as the education and training of the surgical workforce, quality improvement, and the ethics and economics of health care delivery.” Related article Table. JAMA Surgery Statistics for 2016