Editorial

The Publisher's Report at the recent Editorial Board meeting of our Journal, held in Amsterdam on the 28th September, reflected the fact that Gait & Posture is well established and constantly expanding in its field. The number of pages printed increased from 864 in 2005 to 1120 in 2006. A further increase to 1344 pages is planned for 2007. In the first 8 months of 2006 we received 296 manuscript submissions, compared to 262 for the whole of 2005. The number of subscribers to our journal has gradually increased over the years with a healthy distribution around the globe. We also have several thousand institutional electronic accounts and the number of downloaded full-text articles exceeded 150,000 in the first 8 months of 2006. The 2005 impact factor was 1.691 with 235 citations from 139 articles, which ranks Gait & Posture 9th amongst 41 orthopaedic-related journals (©Thomson Scientific Journal Citation Reports®, 2006).

The increased interest in Gait & Posture has led to a backlog of manuscripts waiting to be printed. This is despite the increase in the number of pages printed each year. The time from submission to online publication is currently 36 weeks, while the time from submission to printed publication has risen to 81 weeks. The problem is reflected in the recent Author Feedback review. This highlighted the delay in printing manuscripts as a major cause of author dissatisfaction.

The Editorial Board considered ways to work through this backlog of manuscripts and reduce the publication times. The Publishers agreed to a further increase in the number of pages printed for next year. The Board felt that Gait & Posture should also increase the use and take more advantage of the electronic publication facility accessible via ScienceDirect. Printed articles should contain the core information for the readership, while other files containing additional text, figures, tables or multimedia data can be placed in a supplementary file accessible via ScienceDirect.

With this in mind, future submissions of full articles will not exceed the limits of 3000 words and a total of 5 figures or tables. Gait & Posture will also encourage the submission of Short Communications and Technical Notes, both of which will be limited to 1200 words and up to 3 tables/figures. If the Editors feel that a paper submitted as a full article would be more appropriate for the Short Communication or Technical Note section, then a shortened version will be requested. The academic value of these shorter publications would be equal to the full articles for citation purposes. I would like to emphasise that all of the above types of articles will have unlimited space for additional files accessible electronically. These changes are expected to lead to more concise and focused articles, without affecting the scientific quality of the published material.

The Instructions to Authors (and Reviewers) have been modified from this issue to reflect these changes. I believe the readers of Gait & Posture will welcome our articles becoming more focused, while the prospective authors will see a gradual improvement in our publication time.