Actively Listening: The Not-So-Secret Ingredient for Journal Innovation

Actively listening to our patients and their families is central to the work that we do as clinicians. As editors, we also endeavor to actively listen to your needs and respond accordingly. As we look back over the past 10 years of overseeing the editorial content of our journal, many of the changes were based on ideas you offered to expand the journal’s content and improve its accessibility.

We have published peer-reviewed content on the topics you said would help you improve the care of patients and their families. If you look over the content of our journal in 2018, we included studies on improving vaccination rates, evaluating risks associated with electronic cigarettes and marijuana usage by teenagers, bullying, assessing for and addressing toxic stress, narrowing gaps in social determinants of health, and addressing firearm storage. We published extensively on myriad mental health issues, including autism and depression, and shared studies that help promote the health and well-being of older children and adolescents who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and of other sexualities. Many of these topics have now been organized into Pediatrics Collections to help you quickly discover articles on topics of relevance (www.aappublications.org/pediatriccollections). This past year, we developed a special Pediatrics Collection to address toxic stress in response to concerns from the general public about the long-term impact of the detention of children who immigrated with their families at our southern border. Over the coming year, Pediatrics Collections will continue to be focused on emergent trends that will help you in your daily practice.

We recognize that there are many readers who work to improve child health but are not members of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). For these reasons, each month, we provide free access to articles of particularly high interest to help the public stay informed of the latest research and innovations in child health care. In addition, AAP Policy Statements and the content of all supplements are freely available at the time of publication.

Many readers tell us how busy they are and how they need easier online access to studies of relevance to them. The Gateway Web platform (gateway.aap.org) is the single destination to find articles published in Pediatrics, Hospital Pediatrics, Pediatrics in Reviews, NeoReviews, AAP Grand Rounds, and AAP News. Through Gateway, Pediatrics readership has grown beyond the nearly 70 000 AAP members and subscribers and currently reaches 10.2 million readers who made >64 million visits to our online content in the past year alone.

Gateway was just the start of engaging AAP members and other health care providers. We also have a strong presence on popular social media channels. Our journal now has >116 000 followers on Facebook (facebook.com/aappeds), >2000 on Twitter (@AAPJournals), and >5000 on Instagram (@aap_pediatrics), who learn through social media of new studies as they are released each weekday. In addition, our editorial board members post blogs on our Web site (www.aappublications.org/blog-posts) every day, commenting on newly released studies and articles of interest in our journal. We also send Insight e-mail alerts twice per month using visual imagery to highlight the latest in pediatric research to our readers. The alerts currently reach >140 000 readers every month. If you are interested in receiving these informative e-mails, you may subscribe for free by going to our Web site (pediatrics.org) and clicking on “Sign up for Insight Alerts.”

To further highlight new studies, this past year, we launched Video Abstracts. Authors of selected studies create brief videos to explain the importance of their work. Over the past 6 months, we have posted >50 videos online and promoted them through our social media channels. The videos are also linked in Gateway to their respective articles; you can also find a library of each Video Abstract at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/videoabstracts.

We are proud that the number of total citations to articles published in our journal in 2017 reached 77 301, according to the 2018 Journal Impact Factor, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics, 2018) a jump of 5% from the previous year. As a result, we are the only pediatrics-focused journal in the top 100 most-cited journals in all of science and medicine. Although this is an important reflection of the quality of studies that we publish, our primary goal has been and will continue to be helping you improve the health of children and their families.

In 2017, we added a new section in our journal entitled “Family Partnerships” to share stories of how clinicians and patients or families worked together to address important problems. Over the past year, we were asked by readers to be even more open to partnering with children and families, who after all are the focus of our work. We have now added our first public member to our editorial board, Ms Nikki Montgomery. We have also recruited teenagers, young adults, and other family members to serve as reviewers for Family Partnerships articles. To identify these reviewers, we worked with the AAP Family Partnerships Network and patient and family advisory boards at selected children’s hospitals to create a registry of diverse public reviewers.

We also certainly appreciate the hard work of our peer reviewers, without whom we would not be able to produce our journal. This past year, we began to award continuing medical education credit for article reviews that meet the standards requested in our Reviewer Guidelines. Reviewers can receive 3 American Medical Association Physician’s Recognition Award Category 1 credits and up to a maximum of 15 credits for their review work annually. In 2018, we issued >4000 continuing medical education credits to >1400 reviewers.

The past decade has been one of enormous growth for our journal, none of which would have happened had we not actively listened to the needs of our readers. As we look to the year ahead, we will continue to look forward to your ideas about how we can do even better. Of course, the voices we must always continue to actively listen to are those of the children we care so much about. In doing so, we hope that our journal remains the strongest voice it can be for infants, children, adolescents, and young adults so that they in turn can have the best health outcomes possible.

• Copyright © 2019 by the American Academy of Pediatrics