In This Issue of JWOCN
I have had the unique pleasure of serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for 2 terms, first from 1994 to 2001 when the Journal was renamed as we transitioned from the IAET to the WOCN Society, and then from 2005 to the present. When I first served as the editor, journal issues had fewer pages, readers were fewer, and the author pool was almost exclusively North American. When I was asked again to serve as the Journal's editor, these familiar and comfortable realities were in transition, and evolution continues at a brisk pace. The last installment of our series celebrating the Journal's 40th anniversary will briefly outline JWOCN's role as a player on a global stage, and what that means for the future of your official publication as we continue to serve the members of the WOCN Society.
Evolving Readership
When I first assumed the role of journal editor, the traditional readership of the Journal was comparatively well defined, consisting of WOCN Society members, a much smaller number of private subscribers, and patrons of university or hospital libraries with institutional subscriptions. As a result, the Journal's influence was primarily limited to the United States and Canada. This has changed dramatically. The birth and almost viral growth of global electronic databases such as MEDLINE and its free subsidiary PubMed, CINAHL, and others have dramatically extended the reach of JWOCN. We now reach a global audience-and in a very different format than before. If you read the journal in its printed form or on your iPad, you are one of the relative few who still see the Journal in its original format. Most users employ electronic formats to access individual articles and never see the cover, table of contents, or editorial material. On the plus side, this has literally opened the journal to millions of readers we could never reach using a printed format only, and made other disciplines more aware of JWOCN, including physicians, surgeons, and researchers from related fields such as psychology. These changes have affected our author pool. During my first term as the editor, authors from outside the United States and Canada submitted less than 5% of manuscripts. The number of submitted manuscripts was barely sufficient to fill available pages, and soliciting high-quality contributions was a constant challenge. In 2013, we anticipate a record number of manuscript submissions, possibly over 150 papers. Approximately half of these manuscripts are submitted from international authors in South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Africa. We are also receiving more manuscripts from other disciplines, especially physicians and surgeons interested in wound, ostomy and continence care.
The Editorial Board informally categorizes our rapidly growing readership into 3 broad groups: family, friends, and allies. Family somewhat speaks for itself; this inner circle comprises WOCN Society members who receive the printed JWOCN as one of your membership benefits. Our friends are our affiliate subscribers, members of the Canadian Association of Enterostomal Therapists. We define our allies as those who access individual articles through JWOCN Online, MEDLINE, CINAHL, or another electronic database. Each readership is vital to the Journal, and the Editorial Board actively seeks input from each group. Feedback from WOCN Society members comes from informal communications and analysis of reader surveys from the Society and our publisher, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. CAET Section Editor Kathryn Kozell helps provide informal feedback from CAET members and formal feedback from CAET membership surveys. Obtaining feedback from allies is more difficult. This audience is far larger, and their use is more targeted than persons who read JWOCN via print or iPad. We have several ways of characterizing these readers, including tracking statistics from visitors to our Web page (http://journals.lww.com/jwocnonline/) and tracking the growing number of authors outside North America.
The most important metric for measuring our global impact is clearly our Impact Factor. The impact factor reflects the number of times published articles are cited by other authors as a proportion of the total number of articles published in the journal. Comparatively few nursing journals have an impact factor, and ours remains impressively high for a journal owned and managed by a Society with approximately 5000 members. While this metric provides only 1 indicator of the journal's global impact, it is the state of the art for judging a journal's impact on the discipline or specialty practice they represent. We use the impact factor as a key indicator of our influence on the field of wound, ostomy and continence nursing care, and the associated research needed to inform and support evidence-based clinical decision making.
Serving Our Readership
The rapidly evolving changes in our readership and the means readers use to access JWOCN have led to new challenges and opportunities. The Editorial Board must balance the demands of family, friends, and allies. This includes the research and systematic review articles that are most likely to be read and cited by allies as well as features favored by family and friends, such as Clinical Challenges. We look forward to the continued success of your Journal, and we continue to seek your input to help guide the future as an established player on the global stage.