Oodles of opportunities: the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle in 2017

The good news first, the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle (JCSM) has not only maintained its impact factor, but it has even increased it again, now reaching 9.697 as has been published by Thomson Scientific a few weeks ago. To obtain a grip of the impact factor, it has to be acknowledged that it requires calculation of cites to items published in 2014 and 2015 divided by the number of items published in 2014 and 2015. In numbers, we reached a total of 368 cites in 2014 and 272 cites in 2015, summing up to 640 cites in total. This may not seem a lot, but considering that we only published 66 items deemed countable (editorial comments and letters-to-the-editor are not counted), the final impact factor reached 9.697, implying that each of our papers are cited almost 10 times over the course of 2 years. This places JCSM as the number 8 ranked journal among all journals in the category ‘Medicine, General and Internal’ (Table 1) and as number 2 ranking publication among all nutrition journals, among which, however, JCSM is still not officially listed by Thomson Scientific (Table 2).

As we have done before and are not getting tired of, we herewith express our gratitude to all authors, reviewers, and editorial board members for their great efforts to produce JCSM at good quality, and we greatly appreciate and value also the interest and support of all those who enjoy reading JCSM and cite the papers published there. Of course, the Journal would not be what it is without our editorial office team Monika Diek and Corinna Denecke, and we would also like to express our thanks for their professional support!

This year is special to JCSM for several reasons. One is the publication of additional issues this year, the other is the inauguration of our two daughter journals. Indeed, JCSM appears to have sparked more scientific interest in the field of body wasting, cachexia, and sarcopenia, and thus the number of submissions to the main journal remains on the increase. With a 73% rejection rate, we are well aware of the fact that we have to decline publication of many good papers, simply for lack of space. However, we do hope that we are able to give some of these a home in our daughter journals—JCSM Rapid Communications and JCSM Clinical Reports. The latter is online already since December 2016, and a good number of original research papers has been published since. At the time of writing this editorial in August 2017, the main journal, JCSM, has received already 187 submissions in 2017 alone, proving a steady increase in submissions: last year, this number was ‘only’ 158. Given these higher numbers of submissions, in 2017 we will move to six issues per year to allow publication of more accepted papers.

We are working hard to provide a timely peer review, which is not always easy, as it is difficult to find appropriate reviewers at times. Articles that are available for the longest time are—not surprisingly—those that have been cited most (Table 3). Our ‘facts and numbers’ editorials remain popular (Tables 4 and 5), and we invite our readers to submit their work or to suggest topics for ‘facts and numbers’ editorials that are relevant to our readers (Table 6).

Finally, we would like to draw attention to the upcoming Cachexia Conference to be held between December 8–10, 2017 in Rome, Italy. The conference became an annual meeting already 2 years ago, and it is a source of stimulating ideas and exchange between clinicians and researchers in the field of cachexia and wasting. Data on the final program and more information is to be found at http://society-scwd.org.