Thank you to our contributors: reflections on 2024

Abstract

All submissions to Veterinary Evidence are handled by an Associate Editor specialising in the relevant topic area. We would like to thank these volunteer veterinary professionals for their expertise and time to support the journal. Associate Editors play a central role, assessing submitted papers, guiding the peer review process, and making decision recommendations based on peer review reports. We have welcomed six new Associate Editors to the journal in recent months, and we welcome new applications to join our editorial team.  Our grateful thanks also extend to our peer reviewers, who are critical in ensuring we maintain the highest standards of excellence in our published articles.

In conjunction with our Editorial Board and publishing team, we have developed a new strategy for Veterinary Evidence, aiming to increase the visibility and findability of journal content and develop ways to measure real impact. We will aim to increase the volume and breadth of what we publish and expand the journal’s editorial capacity and capability to enable that. Quality remains central and we will continue to set strong standards for published content through our policies and processes, and to ensure we make the best use of the support from RCVS Knowledge, we will continually improve editorial processes and timelines to increase editorial efficiency and reduce publication timelines.

We are pleased to announce that Veterinary Evidence has recently been accepted for indexing in Scopus and has also been approved for inclusion in PubMed Central. The technical work for indexing to happen is underway, and we will continue to explore options to increase journal content visibility.

Knowledge Summaries guide readers through the evidence on a clinical question. To help with understanding the context of an included study, we have expanded the evidence summary sections to include the full title of the study, a link out to the original article, and a summary of the main aims. The journal continues to grow annually in terms of users and views, and in 2024 we saw a 13% increase in users and a 5% in page views. Submission to the journal also continue at a steady rate.

The process for updating published Knowledge Summaries has now been agreed. The journal runs an annual report of Knowledge Summaries that have search dates (the date that the search was carried out) that are 3 to 4 years old. For that set of papers, we review the usage metrics (views, downloads, citations) and consider whether the questions remain clinically relevant. On this basis, the Editor in Chief will select the top five papers of interest under each of the main three species categories (small animal, production animal, and equine), and we will aim to publish updates of these knowledge summaries.

Finally, we would like to encourage the continued submission of clinical queries and papers for consideration for publication so that the journal can continue to thrive and go from strength to strength.

Professor Peter Cockcroft
Editor in Chief, Veterinary Evidence