Editorial

Citation

Birnbaum, D. and Decker, M. (2016), "Editorial", International Journal of Health Governance, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 202-203. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHG-09-2016-0045

A progress report

Reflecting on the journal’s challenges and achievements during our first year as its co-editors, we are pleased to announce several milestones and give thanks to the many professionals who enabled our success. In order to help authors produce the best manuscripts possible and for us to provide readers with articles that address their information needs, we rely upon the editorial team listed inside the International Journal of Health Governance cover, a global Editorial Advisory Board whose members are identified on our front page and a cadre of others who are less visible. The unnamed include all members of the support team at Emerald and the many professionals who generously share time and expertise to conduct blinded reviews of submitted manuscripts. Those external reviewers who completed one or more reviews in 2016 are:

Waleed Albedaiwi

Ian Callanan

Eric Chan

Anthony Chow

Yvon Dufour

Jan Frich

Robert Geyer

Robert Gibberd

Katrina Glaister

David Greenfield

Rune Jakobsen

Rob James

Christine Jorm

Cathy Kline

Devendra Mahadevan

Mahendran Maliapen

Markus Martin

Wayne Miller

Yogesh Pai

Ali Rawabdeh

Susanna Roughton

Rajiv Singh

Allan Spigelman

Arjun Srinivasan

Karen Staniland

Cheeng Hun Sun

Fiona Thompson

Angela Towle

Over the past year, the review submission times for our reviewers have averaged approximately half of our benchmark target of 30 days, helping us to achieve a turnaround time from submission to decision approximately half of our 60-day benchmark. During this year, we have welcomed new members to our Editorial Advisory Board, fulfilling our desire of ensuring that all regions of the world and all key perspectives will be represented. One gap in our global coverage has been Central and South America and the Caribbean, so this quarter we are very pleased to welcome a new Regional Editor for Latin America to the team, Dr Carlos Espinal.

As co-editors, we take a very active role in providing specific advice to manuscript authors. Due to the large number of excellent contributions we receive and the limited editorial space available, we are able to publish only a fraction of the material submitted. While a rejection disappoints some authors, it has been reassuring to see that the majority who commented on our review process and decisions typically wrote replies like “I am extremely appreciative of the careful consideration our paper has been given, thank you for this.” At the same time, it is gratifying to see that our readers are finding the published papers noteworthy, as evidenced by their average monthly full-text download volume of approximately 2,000 items online – over and above the hard-copy subscription numbers.

We look forward to building upon these milestones as we turn our attention to 2017.