Health promotion research: war on health, battle of bulge or conflict of confidence?

In 2012, we rejected about 85% of nearly 500 manuscripts submitted to Health Promotion International. The editorial team has rather mixed feelings about these numbers, as they signify a few developments in our field, both positive and negative. For the first 20 years of our Journal’s existence the number of submissions very slowly grew to about 200 manuscripts per year. We could publish about half of these papers. We still publish about 100 articles annually in our print journal, and a few more in our Advance Access on-line area. But the vast majority of manuscript submissions are rejected or referred elsewhere. We suffer, like many of our sister journals, from a barrage of papers that aspiring but narrow-minded scholars spray through a multitude of ‘easy’ on-line submission systems. Fortunately, the technology also helps, and with iThenticate we filter out plagiarism easily (we recently found a paper that was virtually 99% glued together from other pieces). But some of our publications have widely been disseminated mainstays of the scholarly body of work in health promotion: our most popular article has been Don Nutbeam’s piece on health literacy (Nutbeam, 2000). This was cited more than 700 times in other peerreviewed papers, and had about 40 000 downloads from the Journal’s website at Oxford University Press. Regrettably, though, a significant cohort of our papers has not been cited at all, not even by the original authors in other work they produced. The editors and publishers have now embarked on some deeper analysis of our publication policies. Most of the bibliographic metrics that are being used to describe the success and efficacy of scholarly publications seem to produce only haphazard information on publication success and efficacy. One should bear in mind that it is not our sole purpose to publish just the methodologically most astute and theoretically brightest research work in the health promotion field; we also intend to contribute to the current debates in health promotion development, as well as add significant value to policies and practices in the field. In some parts of the world (in particular driven by research and development programmes of the European Union), the latter objective is being described as ‘valorization’: ‘. . . the process of disseminating and exploiting project outcomes to meet user needs, with the ultimate aim of integrating and using them in training systems and practices at local, regional, national and European level’. Jansen and Ruwaard (Jansen and Ruwaard, 2012) analyse the profound disconnect between scientific impact (that is, applying metrics such as citations, Impact Factors for journals and H values for individual researchers) and social impact (considering how research has influenced health, well-being and social development). They argue that fundamental and clinical research seems more easily ‘valorized’ than public health and health promotion research. Jansen and Ruwaard therefore suggest that the international (health promotion) research community needs to make an effort towards ‘. . . the development of a compound indicator to equally value scientific and societal impacts’. Indeed, the challenges are enormous: whereas it is relatively easy to track the 700 citations of Nutbeam’s paper, we have virtually no information how the 40 000 downloads of his work have actually influenced new and improved health literacy efforts around the world. Health Promotion International, Vol. 28 No. 1 doi:10.1093/heapro/dat004 # The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com