The past year has been another strong one for the American Journal of Occupational Therapy (AJOT).The journal continues to have the highest journal impact factor (IF) of all occupational therapy journals, although it declined slightly from its previous level. With 4,281 citations in 2016 and 2017, AJOT ranks 12th of 69 rehabilitation journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index and 34th of 134 rehabilitation journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Science Citation Index Expanded.

According to Google Analytics, between January 1 and September 30, 2019, 569,898 users visited the AJOT website, a slight increase of 1.54% from the 561,275 users during the same period in 2018. Both years, 75% of the site visits were by new visitors. Using a different measure, one that focuses on access of articles, AOTA members and other AJOT subscribers accessed articles or downloaded pdfs 265,816 times between January 1 and September 30, 2019, compared with 285,582 times during this period in 2018.

The 2-year IF for 2018 is now 1.952, and the 5-year IF decreased from 3.325 to 2.868 (Clarivate Analytics, 2019; Table 1). It is possible that this decrease is due to the larger number of citable items published in 2016 and 2017.1The IF’s denominator is the number of citable items; if these increase without an equal increase in citations, the IF decreases. The 2018 IF was calculated on the basis of 101 citable items from 2016 and 2017, compared with much fewer citable items in previous years.

Exploration of per-article citations does not reveal much information about why fewer citations of the 2016–2017 articles occurred. Although 2017 was the AOTA Centennial, and we published a greater variety of articles in the Centennial sections, the vast majority remained research articles. Only one type of 2016–2017 article was never cited: education research. For all other types, some received citations and others of the same type did not.

Another measure of impact, the Scopus CiteScore,2is currently 1.88. This places AJOT in the 83rd percentile of occupational therapy journals, ranking 3rd of 17 journals.3 The Scopus Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) metric provides a domain-normalized citation score based on a domain’s citation potential. This metric takes into consideration that different domains of study have different publishing and citation patterns. AJOT’s SNIP metric decreased from 1.88 to 0.974 (Scopus, 2019).

AJOT receives manuscript submissions from and is subscribed to by people around the world. As of September 30, 2019, AJOT had received manuscripts from authors in 24 countries, although 75% of articles accepted were by U.S. scholars. As expected, manuscript submissions increased in 2019, having decreased in 2018. We hypothesize that the dip in submissions in 2018 resulted from a large increase in authors submitting manuscripts for publication in the Centennial year and that the 2019 growth likely reflects a rebound.

From January 1 to September 30, 2019, a total of 271 manuscripts were submitted, the highest number of manuscripts ever submitted to AJOT by this date in a given year (Table 2). Because of this increase in submissions, we added associate editors to the Editorial Board to assist in keeping manuscript processing timely. A total of 71 manuscripts were accepted for publication in this period.

Ninety-one research articles were published in the 2019 volume year. Clinical trials of intervention effectiveness and basic studies were the most common types of research published; fewer effectiveness studies and more basic studies were published than in 2018 (Table 3). Nearly half (48.3%) of the 29 effectiveness studies and reviews provide Level I evidence, a lower percentage than in the past several years. Nine of these articles described original research studies, and the other five were systematic reviews. Several of the original studies were randomized controlled trials in the feasibility or pilot phase, rather than large trials that provide strong evidence allowing for confidence in outcomes.

There was a small increase in studies receiving outside funding in 2019 over the previous 2 years (Table 4). The number of articles with international funding increased, which likely reflects the larger number of quality submissions from international researchers.

Many people volunteer their time to review manuscripts submitted to AJOT, and the journal would not be the quality publication it is if it were not for our reviewers’ important service. AJOT’s reviewers are from around the world, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Spain, and India.

Between January and September 2019, reviewers completed 503 reviews. During that period, 765 requests were sent to potential reviewers asking them to review a manuscript, and 65% of review invitations were accepted. This 15% decrease in acceptances from 2018 is unfortunate, because declines to review and nonresponses from solicited reviewers lengthen the review process, which can be problematic for authors. We suspect that the declines reflect the increasing demands on reviewers from job duties and review requests from other journals.

Unfortunately, few authors provide suggestions for reviewers; doing so would assist the Editorial Board in finding reviewers more quickly. This is particularly an issue when manuscript topics are in a new or small field of study. In an ongoing effort to speed review time, AJOT continues to add to its pool of reviewers across a variety of expertise areas to make it more likely that the Editorial Board will locate two reviewers for each manuscript with less delay. A large pool of official AJOT reviewers also allows the Editorial Board to vary reviewers rather than overburden our most responsive reviewers with too many review invitations.

The Cordelia Myers AJOT Best Article Award was given to Wesam B. Darawsheh for her article “Exploration of Occupational Deprivation of Syrian Refugees in Displacement Contexts in Jordan” (Darawsheh, 2019). This award is given each year to the authors of a research article published in that year that describes high-impact, high-quality research; is timely and highly relevant; and addresses an urgent information need in the field. At least one author must be an occupational therapist. A team of reviewers is asked to select six articles published during the year that best meet these criteria; another team of reviewers selects the winner from this pool of six articles.

A major change for AJOT this year was the move to online-only publishing starting with the January/February 2019 issue. This change went smoothly and has reduced production time. As do all journal publishers, we continue to face pressure to make our content open access. Currently, we use a hybrid open access model whereby prepublication manuscripts may be placed in university research repositories, government-funded research is made available on PubMed, and authors can purchase full open access to make their articles freely available from the start (all AJOT articles are removed from the paywall after 5 years). To improve AJOT’s accessibility, we expect to implement ReadSpeaker before the end of 2019, and we hope to be able to add other tools that enable readers and authors to see how AJOT’s content is being cited and used by others.

AJOT’s overarching goal is to continue to publish research that strengthens the evidence to guide occupational therapy practice, occupational therapy education, and practices that foster general health and development. To achieve this goal, AJOT will continue to publish research on a broad variety of topics that fall within the scope of occupational therapy, including topics that cross disciplinary boundaries. The emphasis will be on publishing top-quality studies at the highest levels of evidence. The AJOT editorial board recognizes that for many topics, authors are just beginning the journey of developing high-level evidence; thus, AJOT will continue to consider manuscripts describing studies at lower levels of evidence in new areas of research. It is imperative that authors’ interpretations of their study findings reflect the strength of the design and sample size and characteristics; the size and clinical meaningfulness of the outcomes; the robustness of the outcomes; and the potential impact for health care, K–12 education, and occupational therapy or interdisciplinary education systems.

AJOT has several specific goals for the 2020 volume year:

• Improve the review process.

• Locate additional official AJOT reviewers, particularly those with expertise in topic areas that are not well represented in our current list of reviewers. We particularly need reviewers with expertise in specific methodologies such as survey research, complex statistical methods, clinical trials, systematic reviewing, single-subject designs, and Rasch analysis.

• Increase the efficiency of Editorial Board processes to reduce the time between review completion and decisions on manuscripts.

• Make a successful transition to a new AJOT editor-in-chief, who will have a 3-year term beginning in July 2020.

• Evaluate the success of the move to an online-only platform.

AJOT will maintain its goal of publishing high-quality research that speaks to the breadth and types of research related to occupational therapy. In doing so, it should maintain its status as the world’s leading occupational therapy journal.

¹The 2-year IF is calculated as the number of times an AJOT article that was published in 2016 or 2017 was cited in 2018 in an article published in the journals indexed by Journal Citation Reports.

²The current CiteScore is the average citations per article that a title receives over a 3-year period. For a given year, Scopus counts the citations in that year to articles published in the preceding 3 years. The 2017 AJOT CiteScore is thus calculated as the number of citations in 2017 to AJOT articles published in 2014, 2015, and 2016, divided by the number of articles indexed on Scopus published in those 3 years.

³Note that Scopus uses a broad definition in categorizing journals as occupational therapy journals; for example, the highest ranked journal in this Scopus category is the Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, and the category also includes the Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation and Physiotherapy Research and Practice.