This is an opportune time to look back and review another year of steady growth for JAMA Cardiology in 2019. The editors are pleased that we have achieved stature among the leading cardiovascular journals. We have experienced ever-increasing submissions of original science, review articles, and opinion pieces covering all of the many expanding fields of cardiology of interest to our readers. Our volume of submissions continues to grow, and in the past year, we received 2336 manuscripts (Table),1-3 an increase of 14% compared with 2018 submissions. Of the total manuscript submissions, 1850 (80%) were reports of original science. We have become a global journal, with 57% of our submissions arriving from outside the US. Our acceptance rate of 7% for original science manuscripts is on par with the other major journals in our field. After only 3 years of publishing, JAMA Cardiology’s impact factor was 11.9 in 2019 (which is reported for 2018). As anticipated, the continuous flow of manuscripts has increased the workload of our very busy editors, but we relish the new knowledge and opinions that we see, evaluate, and discuss on a weekly basis. We continue to learn from each other, our authors, our talented peer reviewers, and our colleagues around the world.
Our weekly online content is now delivered to more than 42 000 readers, with more than 1.6 million article views and downloads. We maintain an active presence on social media, with an increase during the past year to more than 72 000 Twitter and Facebook followers. Our new section on cardiovascular images has been particularly notable on social media as well as in print. Our monthly podcast discussions with authors remain highly popular.4 The close linkage of this journal to JAMA and the other JAMA Network journals connects us to the dedicated editorial and publication staff who facilitate the dissemination of our weekly and monthly content in print and through multimedia channels.
Our content continues to attract considerable attention by the news media, and articles published in JAMA Cardiology in 2019 received mention in more than 4200 reports, including such major sources as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe. It is difficult this early in the new year to identify those articles published in the last year that have the potential for the greatest ultimate impact, but we do recognize those that received the highest Altmetric scores (a measure of news and social media coverage) in 2019 (Table). As is often the case, with ongoing interest among professional and lay readers in the cardiovascular effects of nutritional supplements, the most notable article was a meta-analysis by Barbarawi et al1 demonstrating the lack of association of vitamin D supplementation with cardiovascular risks in more than 83 000 individuals enrolled in 21 randomized clinical trials. A report by DeFina et al2 based on a unique data set of healthy adults with varying degrees of physical fitness showed that high levels of physical activity are associated with elevated coronary artery calcium scores but not with increased all-cause or cardiovascular mortality. A provocative article from Yan and colleagues3 reported the potential use of facial photoplethysmographic signals using a smartphone video camera for rapid high-throughput detection of individuals with atrial fibrillation; this was followed by an Editor’s Note from Turakhia5 discussing the possible benefits of such screening but with words of caution regarding privacy concerns and continuing uncertainties regarding the treatment strategies for asymptomatic individuals in whom atrial fibrillation is detected in a screening program.
The editors thank the more than 700 of our colleagues who served as peer reviewers in 2019.6 We value the time and effort required for effective peer review, and we are grateful for the knowledge and insights our reviewers have provided to enhance the analytic methods, data presentation, and interpretations of our manuscripts. The most insightful reviewers are often called on to write Invited Commentaries and Editorials to enhance the interpretation of original data for our readers and to place the findings in context with current and future trends in the field.
Maintaining this level of productivity requires the dedicated efforts of the talented deputy and associate editors of JAMA Cardiology who have added this responsibility to their otherwise busy professional and personal lives. Our group literally spends hundreds of hours critiquing manuscripts, communicating with authors and reviewers, and making the editorial decisions that create our content for publication. In addition to overseeing the flow of manuscripts, the editorial team collectively provides the strategic vision and direction of the journal. Words of thanks are insufficient to express how much I appreciate these efforts.
As JAMA Cardiology matures, we look forward to maintaining the momentum we have created in our first few years of publishing that has positioned us among the premier journals in our discipline. The contributions of scientific articles, Reviews and educational articles, Viewpoints, and other opinion articles remains the backbone of the journal. We look forward to working with authors to attract their best work, thus granting JAMA Cardiology a prominent role in advancing the discourse and expanding the boundaries of cardiovascular science.
Corresponding Author: Robert O. Bonow, MD, MS, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, 676 N St Clair St, Ste 600, Chicago, IL 60611 (robert.bonow@nm.org).
Published Online: March 25, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamacardio.2020.0403
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.