Katie Dunn

Improving our services

We have always set high standards for JSAP and over the past few years have made significant changes to the systems for submission and reviewing. The benefits of these changes to readers and authors alike are only just becoming obvious. In both 2007 and 2008 the journal’s impact factor increased and now stands at 0.908. The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which articles in the journal are cited in subsequently published papers and so it gives some indication of the relevance of papers published in JSAP to those working in similar fields. In the league table of veterinary titles, JSAP is now ranked 48th out of 133 (a rise of 13 ranking places from last year). The impact factor of a journal is certainly not the only measure by which a journal should be judged, but an increasing impact factor does stimulate increased submissions (and hopefully better quality submissions) from which reviewers can select the articles to be published.

Selective publication and its impact on clinical knowledge

One of the ethical questions raised in journal publishing is that of the under reporting of ‘negative’ results. A negative trial result is not where a study shows adverse effects of a therapy or treatment, these results are clearly often published. By contrast, a ‘negative’ study is one which produces no clear result. This is typically seen in trials comparing a conventional treatment ‘X’ to a new therapy ‘Y’, when the new drug ‘Y’ is not demonstrated to perform better than standard therapy. In fact, the power of many studies, most particularly in veterinary medicine (largely due to low case numbers), is often so low that real (but small) differences existing between therapies cannot be shown. So, in fact treatment Y may be marginally better than treatment X, but since too few cases were recruited to demonstrate the difference the conclusions are that treatment ‘Y’ offers no benefit and therefore the long established treatment ‘X’ persists. Studies in the human medical field have shown that there is under reporting of negative results.