Where do the readers of Acta Physiologica come from?

Today, one third of our downloads come from readers in the United States, North America accounts for roughly 40% of all downloads. This is remarkable, since Acta Physiologica is still widely recognized as a journal with Scandinavian roots. However, interesting trends are taking place: The United States is the largest contributor of manuscripts. What is more, Acta Physiologica is now available in 5,116 institutions in the developing world via philanthropic initiatives. This has had an enormous effect on our readership; countries with greater developing potential are increasingly downloading our articles. In China, the increase within one year has been 22%.

Acta Physiologica availability is increasing worldwide. In 2012, 4,681 institutions assessed Acta Physiologica via the Wiley-Blackwell license. This compares to 4,231 in 2011, and is a indicator for the strong performance of Acta Physiologica, particularly when keeping in mind the general trend towards decreasing subscriptions in health sciences. Thus, it does not surprised that they renewal rate of subscriptions is harder for Acta Physiologica than for comparable journals.

The excellent performance parameters reflect the increasing quality and popularity of articles published in Acta Physiologica. A double-digit number of articles were downloaded over 1000 times in 2012. Full text downloads have increased once more by 7% in 2012. The download intensities particularly remarkable when considering that 20% less pages were printed in 2012 compared to the previous year. During the last decade, downloads more than doubled.
Thank you all for helping out!

A farewell to Börn Folkow….

Sadly, one of our most prominent contributors in this field, Björn Folkow, has just recently passed away at the age of 90. An obituary in our December issue highlights the milestones of Folkow’s career. Hardly anyone has contributed more to physiology in Sweden over the last century.

Acta Physiologica presents a new award for neurohumoral control.
There is a long tradition of publishing work in neurohumoral control in Acta Physiologica. Our most recent prize carries the name of von Euler. He has enormously contributed to the field of neurohumoral control. not only did he discover that noradrenaline is the transmitter of sympathetic nerve endings, he also discovered that noradrenaline is stored in vesicles. Moreover, prostaglandins were first described by him as well is substance P. In our latest issue of Acta Physiologica you can read much more about this fascinating person and find out how you can apply for this award.

Welcome to Acta Physiologica’s blog!

Dear Friends,

Welcome to our Acta Physiologica blog! We are launching this blog so that our authors and readers have the opportunity to share their thoughts with the large community.

Have you seen our latest issue? Here it is:

presumably, you are expecting me to encourage you to simply go to our Journal homepage and read every article you can put your hands on. Of course I will provide you a link

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291748-1716;jsessionid=D3A1D634BDA647AB05B2A861898FF5EC.d01t04?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+on+26+May+from+10%3A00-12%3A00+BST+%2805%3A00-07%3A00+EDT%29+for+essential+maintenance

and you are more than welcome to start reading immediately.

However I think there’s something more immediate that may find your interest: it is the question of what makes a Journal good and how can we improve the quality of Acta Physiologica and can be found in greater detail in a recent editorial:

What can be the best surrogate endpoint for the quality of a Journal? Markers for the quality and prestige of a Journal are widely debated. To many of our readers, it is probably the amount of articles that are read by our peers, which indicates the quality of our Journal, and studies support that this is indeed a valid marker for Journal performance.

Over the last 10 years, the download of articles from Acta Physiologica  has more than tripled.

There have been two episodes showing a strong increase in downloading numbers. The first increase took place between 2002 and 2005, which may in part be due to the advances in technology, and the transition from reading printed material to downloading articles online. It is a particular pleasure to point out the second time interval in which downloads have increased rapidly: from 2009 to today. Obviously, we are reaching more and more readers worldwide. Since the downloaded material is an early marker for the performance of our Journal, this trend bodes well for the future of our Impact Factor.  Indeed, our Impact Factor has been above 3 for some time, and we just moved up two notches in the journal ranking this year!

Another commonly used measure for the performance of a Journal is the number of submitted material. Acta Physiologica  counted almost 500 submitted items in the year 2011, which is very impressive and once more demonstrates the upward trend of the Journal.

Pontus Persson, chief editor

How is Acta’s review process?

Share with us your experiences with Acta’s review process!

Here is some background information for the time span from 1.10.2011 to 15.8.2012:

• There was a total of 270 initial submissions to the Journal. This includes all material, such as original articles, reviews, editorials and letters. 97 manuscripts where accepted amounting to 36% acceptance rate. When excluding the secondary materials such as editorials and letters, the acceptance rate is 30%.
• 80% of all submitted original manuscripts receive a full review. The remaining 20% are triaged at the editors level.
• Average Days from submission to first decision 25,75.
• from October 1, 2011 until 15 August 2012 we made decisions on 25 editorials, three rapid communications, 199 regular papers and six review articles.
• Where do the manuscript come from? As a new trend, the major nation submitting manuscripts of the United States with 20 manuscript submitted of which 55% were accepted. The second nation Japan, followed by the United Kingdom, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Poland . High acceptance rates were found for Denmark, France, the United States, Hungary, and Sweden.

Where does Acta stand?

For decades, Acta Physiologica has been among the top-notch physiology journals. With the new geographical focus aiming at including all countries worldwide Acta Physiologica once more is a leading journal. In 2011, Acta Physiologica ranked among the very best journals of our discipline, no matter from what perspective this ranking is performed. Roughly speaking, Acta Physiologica is listed among the top third of the journals classified as physiology journals. Take for instance the Article Influence Score. This measure mirrors the average influence of an article over the first five years. Or, simply take the Impact Factor, which is the most common index of the influence of a Journal. With regard to the Impact Factor, Acta Physiologica has taken two steps up and is once again ranked among those journals that traditionally have been compared to Acta Physiologica. We must thank Jan Henriksson for his dedication to this Journal and extreme expertise, which put Acta Physiologica back to where we belong.

In contrast to many other physiology journals that are similarly located in the ranking, Acta Physiologica exhibits a very low self citation rate. Only 3% of all citations refer to Acta Physiologica articles. Other leading journals of physiology exhibit values which are considerably higher, at around 5-7%.

Where do you think Acta can change? What can we do better?

Looking forwad to read what you would change in Acta!

 

Pontus

Pontus Persson

Chief Editor