According to Essential Science Indicators
from
Thomson
Scientific, the Journal of Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndromes (JAIDS) ranks at #18 among the
59 journals comprising the top 50% in the field of
Immunology. The journal's citation record in the
database includes 2,306 highly cited papers with a
total of 37,919 citations for papers published between
January 1, 1997 and December 31, 2007.
Founded in 1988, JAIDS is published by Lippincott Williams
& Wilkins, a division of Wolters Kluwer Health. The journal takes a
rather novel approach to its interdisciplinary subject matter, with an
Editor-in-Chief to oversee each section of Basic Science, Clinical Science,
and Epidemiology.
In the interview below, ScienceWatch.com
correspondent Gary Taubes talks with Clinical Science
Editor Paul Volberding about the journal's history and
citation record.
How long have you been an Editor-in-Chief at
JAIDS?
From the beginning, some 20 years ago. It’s important to point out
that JAIDS has a pretty unique structure for a medical journal. We
have three Co-Editors-in-Chief: one focuses on the basic science of
AIDS; one on the clinical science—that’s
me—and one focuses on the epidemiology and population science,
including a lot of the prevention work we do. I’m the Clinical
Editor-in-Chief of JAIDS, and I have been since it started. My
counterparts are David Ho in New York, who is the Basic Sciences
Editor-in-Chief, and Bill Blattner at the University of Maryland, who is
the Epidemiology and Population Sciences Editor-in-Chief.
What do you think accounts for JAIDS's success
and its increasing citation rate?
Our feeling is that we have a good structural approach to the
decision-making in JAIDS, with three co-editors, and that
that’s been paying off recently in what we’re able to
accomplish—rapid response to publications, maintaining a fairly tight
list of papers in process, offering the authors a rapid turnaround time
from submission to publication. We think all that’s made the journal
particularly attractive and we’re delighted to see that paying off.
So, bottom line, you’re getting better
papers?
We’re getting better papers, absolutely. We’ve also really
worked to increase the international feel of the journal. Our major
competitor is seen more as a European-based journal, and historically has
been somewhat more international in the sense of European authors.
We’ve really worked hard to catch up with that. We think a lot of the
best work is being done in Europe and elsewhere, particularly in clinical
science.
"I think one
challenge for all journals is that
we now live in an era in which
information is so available, so out
there, that we have to continually
question the role of traditional
journals."
Increasingly good clinical work is also being done in resource-limited
settings. Right now I’d say a majority of the articles we get are
either from Europe or Africa. And that’s been a change. We've really
tried to stay ahead of that. We’ve tried to maintain a collection of
reviewers who are from those areas, which we think, again, helps maintain
that momentum.
What do you think is driving that trend in Europe and
Africa?
The European investigators are quite nimble and they’ve had, perhaps,
lower structural barriers to clinical investigation. It’s possible
that the bureaucracy in some of these countries is a little more responsive
than it's been in the US. The Europeans also have some very well-organized,
large, and long-standing cohorts of HIV-infected patients, and those cohort
studies have been a very important part in where clinical investigation is
now.
In the earlier days of HIV, most of the progress was in direct
interventional trials. As new drugs were brought on board and tested, both
for HIV and the complications of immune deficiency, as therapy has become
increasingly effective, a lot of the more important questions have shifted
to what can broadly be described as outcomes investigations. There are
large cohorts in Switzerland, for example, which contain essentially all
the HIV-infected patients in that country. There are European collaborative
cohorts that make up for smaller numbers in each country by joining those
cohorts together. That’s one very important reason.
In terms of the lesser-developed nations, I think the field in the last
five years has increasingly recognized that we now have the option of
bringing antiretroviral therapies to many of these countries. That’s
given rise to a large number of investigations, which have addressed
variations in the epidemic, in strain differences in the virus, cultural
factors affecting transmission, and specific disease manifestations.
As antiretrovirals have been introduced, researchers have addressed other
very important questions that couldn’t have been done in the US.
Here, these drugs were introduced piecemeal, first with one drug and then
the next; in Africa, countries have effectively received the
antiretrovirals all at once, and this has led to some very important work
being done in the so-called immune response inflammatory syndrome, as
patients treated with these antiretrovirals regain immunity and often
develop immune reactions, sometimes destructive, against antigens present
from opportunistic infections, for example. These have become very
interesting, very important areas of research. And we’ve been seeing
a number of excellent articles on that.
What we’re also seeing from Africa and Asia are studies of
co-infections, particularly with tuberculosis, which has been a very
important clinical problem. These are areas of research where, again, the
lesser-developed countries are now leading the way.
Are there other specific areas of research or external
factors that might be driving the rise in citation rates?
HIV medicine has also been really leading the way for the past 15 years in
our understanding of how patients take their medications. As we developed
more effective, but sometimes very complicated regimens of drugs, with the
backdrop of drug resistance being such a problem, this has led to real
advancements in the study of so-called medication adherence. It’s
important in all medicine, but in HIV, the risks of becoming drug resistant
make it a far more substantial problem. There’s been some really
innovative research there, and it’s been a source of many papers.
The toxicity of drugs is another major topic. As HIV becomes a truly
chronic disease, the duration patients must take their medications poses
another real challenge—an interesting one. As drugs were approved
quickly here, the risk that we might see unexpected toxicities with
longer-term use is a real question. Again that’s a source of a lot of
the research we publish.
How do you see JAIDS evolving in the next
half-dozen years?
I personally think that our division into three broad topics has been a
very healthy one for us. I think we will continue with that. We have had
discussions internally about ways we might more explicitly address issues
in developing nations, whether we should specifically identify review
processes that might help get even more of that research to our journal.
For the most part, though, we’re quite happy with how things are
going.
Like many journals, we’re now an exclusively online submission and
review journal. It took us a while to get that down, but it’s been a
tremendous asset. We’re now able to track turnaround time and the
quality of the reviews we get, and that’s been very important. I see
the next few years as a process of further refining some of these things
that seem to already be working quite well.
Another issue here is how journals will deal with real-time, online
content. We try to move material online as quickly as possible, but we
could probably still do better. That ends up being at some level a business
decision, not just a reviewing question. But it’s the kind of issue
we’ll be talking about a lot in the next few years.
What do you think the greatest challenges are in
reviewing and publishing AIDS research?
I think one challenge for all journals is that we now live in an era in
which information is so available, so out there, that we have to
continually question the role of traditional journals. It's also a constant
challenge to find people willing to spend the time and effort to give us a
really meaningful, thoughtful review. That’s no different from the
way it’s always been, but it’s a challenge that never goes
away.
Another particular challenge we face in AIDS and HIV is that of a lot of
important research comes in the form of descriptive information from these
lesser-developed settings. We can’t really very effectively mentor
those contributors from such a distance. So I think perhaps we may have to
find better ways to publish research—venues for descriptive studies
that might not otherwise fare well in a peer-reviewed journal. One
possibility is to have open-access hosting of clinical experiences, whether
in case-report forms or clinic-experience forms from a specific area. That
could be quite useful.
What role do you think JAIDS plays in AIDS and
HIV research? What do you perceive as its contribution to the
field?
We’ve been, very obviously, an important specialty journal over a
span of time that covers much of the history of AIDS—from a period
when it was a rapidly fatal, non-curable disease. And we have been an
active participant in helping develop the science that allowed it to become
a chronic disease.
I think we’ve been a particularly important vehicle for American
investigators. We’ve also had very close relationships with different
NIH institutes; we’ve published supplements from the CDC, NIMH, and
others. As such, our role as a collaborator with health-policy and
research-policy organizations has made us productive in those areas, as
well.
Is there anything else you would like to add or tell the
general public about the work your journal does and
publishes?
I think it’s heartening to know that there is still very active
research interest in HIV and AIDS. We see challenges of continuing to
improve the drugs and understand and reduce toxicities. One very important
issue is that as these populations with HIV age with their disease, we will
have to understand the very long-term effects of chronic infection with
HIV. And there will also be other important areas for us to watch. The
prospects are good for substantial research that requires the presence of a
journal like JAIDS.
JAIDS—Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency
Syndromes David D. Ho, Paul Volberding, and William Blattner,
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, publishers
Journal of Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndromes's most-cited paper with 249 cites
to date:
Mulligan K, et al., "Hyperlipidemia and insulin
resistance are induced by protease inhibitors independent
of changes in body composition in patients with HIV
infection," J. Acq. Immune Defic. Syndr. 23(1):
35-43, 1 January 2000. Source:
Essential Science Indicators
from
Thomson Scientific.