P Martelletti

Paolo Martelletti

Journal of Headache and Pain

English

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The Journal of Headache and Pain

Chronicling the June conundrum

MARTELLETTI, Paolo

Archivio della ricerca- Università di Roma La Sapienza

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EDITORIAL
Chronicling the June conundrum
Paolo Martelletti
Published online: 15 July 2011
 The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Rethinking JHP’s evolution
The publication on June 28 2011 of the Journal Citation
Reports, with the new Impact Factor (IF) 2010, based on the
citations that every journal indexed in Sci-Search has
received in the previous biennium, has shown how the arrival
of The Journal of Headache and Pain (JHP) in the headache
scientific arena has not been a meteor. Hence some hasty
catastrophic previsions have been neither correct nor rea-
sonable. The stabilization of the IF 2010 on the value of
2.015 has reconfirmed that the reliance in the contents of the
journal is constant and well placed. On behalf of the whole
great team of people who work at this project, I express the
sense of honor and the great satisfaction for the service
rendered to the scientific community.
Stabilization phase of the IF value
After the JHP appearance, just 2 years ago, in the interna-
tional IF ranking and the following push towards a rise, a
phase of stabilization and consolidation of the results is
welcomed and reassuring [1, 2]. The analysis of the contents
that have brought to today’s evaluation of the IF is food for
thoughts (full analytical data are available as ESM):
(i) The number of citations has increased by 20% as
compared to 2009
(ii) The number of accepted papers has increased to 70%
as compared to 2009
(iii) The number of submitted papers has increased to
71% as compared to 2009
(iv) The rejection rate has remained steady at the value of
55%
Taking into account that we have fully recognized an
increased quantity (quality) of the submitted papers (iii)
and it has resulted in a higher number of accepted papers
(ii), making vain the point relative to the citations (i). This,
however, witnessed the higher interest that the readership
keeps showing towards JHP.
SpringerOpen fall-out
The much debated and feared opening towards the strategy
of open access to contents for everyone, without costs, has
been feasible through the utilization of various grants. I thank
European Headache Federation, Lifting The Burden, Sapi-
enza University, Springer and advertisers, who made this
choice possible. Consequently, the visibility of JHP has had a
sudden and violent rise. In fact, in the first 4 months of this
new SpringerOpen model, the rate of downloaded papers has
risen up by 60%. All this has accomplished a much wider
educational mission of every paper and therefore of JHP also,
and lays strong basis for a positive fall-out in terms of
number of citations on the next evaluation in 2012.
Future strategies
It is now important to attract more and more high-value
reviews, original papers, basic science papers or tutorials.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this
article (doi:10.1007/s10194-011-0365-x) contains supplementary
material, which is available to authorized users.
P. Martelletti (&)
Department of Medical and Molecular Sciences,
Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
e-mail: paolo.martelletti@uniroma1.it
123
J Headache Pain (2011) 12:397–398
DOI 10.1007/s10194-011-0365-x
These are the pillars of the editorial development of JHP.
There is a need to attract also updated therapeutic guidelines,
new classification proposals, or position papers, or RCTs,
which are proved to be a great boost factor for the IF indexes.
But these are field choices for the affiliated societies.
Anyways, from 2012 JHP will appear with eight issues
per year and the articles, now freely available online from
the SpringerLink platform [3], will additionally be acces-
sible from the PubMed Central Journal List [4]. The latter
is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences
journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s
National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). This will rep-
resent a further extraordinary access point, allowing a
much wider diffusion of JHP contents.
Every year the conundrum of IF fills the month of June
with hopes, doubts and expectations. JHP does not live this
event with less anxiety; the Journal, beyond its possible
imperfections, attributes real values to the work and the
choices of all of us: Editors, Board Members, Referees,
Researchers, Readers, Publisher.
I think this is the staging post for every scientific jour-
nal, to serve the civil society helping it to reach its scien-
tific, educational and health care unmet needs.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, dis-
tribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author(s) and source are credited.
References
1. Martelletti P (2009) While climbing the hill, you think it’s
possible. J Headache Pain 10:309–310
2. Martelletti P (2010) The Journal of Headache and Pain keeps
gaining consensus. J Headache Pain 11:287–288
3. http://www.springerlink.com/content/1129-2369/. Accessed 30
June 2011
4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/. Accessed 30 June 2011
398 J Headache Pain (2011) 12:397–398
123


The Journal of Headache and Pain keeps gaining consensus.

While climbing the hill, you think it’s possible.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=3139055

Chronicling the June conundrum

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Archivio della ricerca- Università di Roma La Sapienza

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