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Radiography (2007) 13, 1

Editorial

There are several items to bring to your attention in thiseditorial, including: information about reviewers, the [UK]Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), our Instructions toAuthors, a virtual special issue and also a special issue.

At the last Editorial Board Meeting (July 2006) it wasagreed that some thought needed to go into how we supportnew and existing reviewers. Reviewers play a critical role inmaintaining the quality of our journal and my thanks goesout to them. As part of the [peer] review process, thereviewers read submitted articles and make comments uponthem and advise the Editors on whether the work is suitablefor publication e in its current form or after alterationshave been made or that it should not be published in ourjournal. Currently we have around 380 reviewers, beingdrawn from the range of academic and clinical disciplinesthat underpin our professional area. To help address the sup-port for reviewers two articles about reviewing articles havebeen written, and alongside these two powerpoint presenta-tions have been created. We intend to make the two articlesavailable worldwide to new and existing reviewers. We willhold a series of reviewer workshops around the UK and Ire-land and also run a similar workshop within ‘UKRC 2007’(an international peer reviewed conference). It is antici-pated that other peer-reviewed journal editors will contrib-ute to this conference-based workshop, enabling a richerinformation sharing and support exercise.

As you probably know, in the past 3 years, we havemade many adjustments to our journal so that morematerial can be included. These adjustments have beenreported in previous Editorials. A very recent adjustment,again arising from the July 2006 Editorial Board Meetingwas to further refine the Instructions to Authors. The fullversion is now available online.1 The most importantchange I wish to bring to your attention is the maximumword count, and this varies according to article ‘type’ (ex-amples of ‘type’ include Case Study and Letter to the Edi-tor). Conciseness, combined with clarity, will allow us toinclude more material and I estimate this word count re-striction would permit an extra 1e2 pages of content perissue. It might be worth noting that the use of word limitsis in-line with many other well-known journals.

1 http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/623068/authorinstructions.

1078-8174/$ - see front matter ª 2006 The College of Radiographedoi:10.1016/j.radi.2006.10.003

The [UK] RAE is a Government-led audit of researchactivity within universities. An important criteria assessedduring the exercise is the quality and quantity of publishedarticles. In previous RAEs only impact-rated journals, and thearticles therein, were considered truly worthy of inclusion.However the inherent problems of impact-rating, combinedwith many journals not being impact-rated, have resulted ina very sensible decision. The decision is that any article canbe submitted for RAE assessment and it does not matterwhich journal it was published in. Impact-rating, as such, isredundant within the forthcoming RAE. Fundamentally it isfelt that the quality of the article is more important than thejournal in which it is published. This is an important move forour journal, because we are not currently impact-rated.Similarly this is important for our profession, because manyacademic radiographers publish work in our journal.

We are working on two special issues of our journal.Special issues tend to be published in addition to the [four]existing issues. The first one to be available will be ‘virtual’,and will comprise a compendium of articles about advancedclinical practice that have already been published e datingback to January 1995. This is an important topic as webelieve our journal carries the highest density of informationabout advanced clinical practice in radiography. We alsoknow that many other countries are starting to pursue thisprofessional development. Consequently, at the July 2006Editorial Board Meeting, we agreed to make our advancedpractice articles available world-wide in an easy to accessform. For this virtual special issue we have an eminent GuestEditor (Richard Price, University of Herefordshire, UK) whohas written a new editorial specifically for this virtual issue.This special issue should be available by December 2006.

The second special issue will be about contrast agents inmagnetic resonance. This is a rapidly developing area and wehave two Guest Editors e Leslie Robinson (University of Salford,UK)and AllisonMcGhee (University CollegeDublin, Ireland).Wehope that this issue will be published by July of 2007.

Peter Hogg, Editor in ChiefDepartment of Radiography, University of Salford, Greater

Manchester M6 6PU, UKE-mail address: p.hogg@salford.ac.uk

Available online 30 November 2006

rs. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.