A Practical Guide to Selecting Foot and Ankle Journals for Publication

Abstract

Category: Other Introduction/Purpose: It is often difficult for early career investigators to identify the ideal journal readership for foot and ankle research without knowledge of each journal’s culture and article preferences. Bibliometric analyses have shown the popularity of certain topics can vary widely between similar journals. However, in the foot and ankle literature, there is very little information available regarding the publication preferences of common journals. The goal of this project was to provide a practical table with publishing trends to help investigators identify one or more journals most suitable for a given manuscript. Methods: We examined 43 journals, including both general orthopedic journals and foot and ankle-specific publications. We utilized the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE database for general article information, and Web of Science’s (WOS) Journal Citation Report for citation counts. Journals were only included for analysis if they published a minimum of 50 foot and ankle (FA) articles in the past five years, and were indexed in both MEDLINE and WOS. Variables such as publishing nationality, number of authors, and article type were collected using MEDLINE article metadata. Keyword lists were generated by our author team for each topic, and keywords were then searched to calculate the percentage of articles categorized under that topic. To measure the impact factor of a journal, we calculated a 5-year “impact factor” following modified WOS guidelines (total citations in 2020 for articles published 2015-2019 / total publications from 2015-2019). Results: 29 journals met our inclusion criteria for analysis (67%), of which 6 specialized in foot and ankle (Table 1). The popularity of certain article topics varies widely between journals. For example, while the Journal of Foot and Ankle Research publishes more than twice as many sports articles than any other FA publication (25%), it publishes five times less arthroscopy publications (2%). Similarly, we also find notable differences in the type of article published by journals – while only 1% of the total articles published by FAI are case reports, the Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery published 30% case reports the past five years. We also found the distribution of American first authors can vary widely – ranging from 95% to 0% in different journals. Conclusion: This data set is aimed to provide a practical tool for early investigators to select ideal journals that would be appropriate for their work. Metrics like nationality may help authors intentionally reach out to a more diverse international audience, or an American readership, when appropriate. Likewise, targeting manuscripts that are a topic of interest to journals can save time in the publication process that is spent in initial review. While this data set relies exclusively on publicly available metadata from MEDLINE and WOS, we believe it offers an encouraging start to better understand the foot and ankle publishing landscape.