It has been quite a while since I last wrote an editorial. Things have been going smoothly with the journal so there seemed to be no pressing urgency and as the saying goes, “time waits for no man.” Next thing I knew, it’s been quite a while.

But now it’s the time to update you. I am happy to say that things are still going well with the journal.

  1. 1.

    Obesity Surgery remains a popular journal for publishing manuscripts. The number of manuscripts submitted to the journal has risen every year. For example, in 2014, 759 manuscripts were submitted for consideration. In 2017, it was 981. Five months into 2018, we have already received 448 manuscripts. Extrapolated for the whole year and we are predicting that we will receive approximately 1075 manuscripts. This is truly a milestone for Obesity Surgery. What does this mean for the readership and IFSO? There is a limit to the number of manuscripts that are published monthly. After increasing the journal size several times in the past few years, we may have reached the limit. The journal, therefore, has become increasingly selective of the quality of the papers it publishes. Slightly more than half of the papers submitted are rejected and that number may continue to increase. As the quality of the published papers continues to improve, the journal and IFSO both are increasingly looked upon favorably by the academic and scientific worlds.

There is a down side to the increased number of manuscripts submitted. No, I am not referring to the cutting down of more tress to print the larger issues every month. I am referring to the increased workload of the 29 Associate Editors, the nearly 100 Editors, and the too numerous to count reviewers. They keep the journal running and we owe them a debt of gratitude. Additionally, the next time you think your submitted manuscript is long overdue, think about all of the papers we collectively process, about 40 every week.

  1. 2.

    Another sign of the quality of a journal is the number of times Full-Text articles are downloaded from the journal. I am happy to report that the number of downloads has also increased yearly. In 2013, articles in Obesity Surgery were downloaded 271,115 times. In 2017, there were 534,608 and thus far in the first 6 months of 2018, there are 274,047. That is a lot of gigabytes!!

  2. 3.

    Impact Factor (IF) is a scoring system by which journals are ranked according to the number of citations received in the previous 2 years. The higher the number, the more prestigious the journal. For example, the IF for 2016 is derived from the number of citations divided by the number of published articles. In this case, 2289 citations divided by 580 published articles equals an IF of 3.947. As far as I can tell, this is the highest IF in the history of Obesity Surgery. In addition, we were the 18th highest impact surgical journal out of almost 200 English language surgical journals. You would be quite surprised to know which ones are below us.

Even more impressive is that our 5-year IF is 4.198. In 2017, the IF dropped a hair to 3.895. It is about even with SOARD and Obesity Surgery remains the 18th highest ranking surgical journal.

  1. 4.

    There is another less popular ranking for journals called the h5 Index. This tool was created by Google Scholar for researchers. This metric is based on the articles published over the previous 5 years. “h” represents the largest number of articles that have been cited “h” times. The h5 Index for Obesity Surgery in 2017 was 58. That meant that there were 58 articles in Obesity Surgery that each had been cited at least 58 times. While the metrics seem confusing, what is not confusing is that Obesity Surgery was ranked 8th overall for surgical journals (SOARD was 15th) and 5th overall for Obesity-related journals (SOARD was 6).

  2. 5.

    Lastly, there is a new scoring system that was recently released by Scopus called the CiteScore*. Once again, Obesity Surgery performed better than many other surgical journals. Here is the breakdown of the top scorers:

Annals of Surgery

5.14

British Journal of Surgery

4.79

JAMA Surgery

3.30

Obesity Surgery

2.92

Surgical Endoscopy

2.92

J American College of Surgery

2.80

Journal of GI Surgery

2.64

International Journal of Surgery

2.55

World Journal of Surgery

2.42

SOARD

2.31

American Journal of Surgery

2.09

  1. *Courtesy of Ali Aminian, MD, FACS

I have had the honor of being the Editor-in-Chief of Obesity Surgery since September of 2011. It has been a joy and a privilege. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with so many talented and dedicated clinicians, none of whom are paid for their efforts. My goal when I took over the Editorial position was, is, and will always be to make Obesity Surgery a top 10 journal with an Impact Factor comfortably above 4.0. I therefore would appreciate any comments or suggestions for improvements from the readership. I welcome all articles for consideration of publication, especially review articles. I also would appreciate anyone who would like to become a reviewer, and possibly over time, an editor.

I wish everyone a joyful, healthy, and safe summer and I look forward to seeing you all in Dubai.

Best wishes,

Scott