Public Health Reports in 2021: Impact Factor Increase and New Article Collections on Racism and COVID-19

Abstract

In 2021, PHR launched the Public Health Reports: Year in Review article series to inform its contributors and readers about its latest publication metrics, content, and planned improvements. 3 The series started with a review of the journal's publications and operations in 2020. This second installment compares 2021 and 2020 data and adds a few new metrics that were not captured in 2020 (eg, turnaround times associated with postacceptance editing). While the journal's content continues to be assembled into issues, the realities of scholarly publishing increasingly demand that articles be published online as soon as possible. To allow for historic volume-based comparison, the analysis of PHR's 2021 published content was performed by volume, not online publication date, making an exception for time-sensitive COVID-19 articles, which were analyzed by online publication date.

Public Health Reports in 2022: Impact Factor Increase; COVID-19 Coverage; Authorship by State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Agencies; and New Department on Public Health Ethics

“…4 In 2022, PHR's editor in chief made 776 first decisions on bimonthly peer-reviewed content (vs 1073 first decisions in 2021). 4 This number differs from the number of articles submitted in 2022 (n = 772) because decisions made in early 2022 may have included late 2021 submissions and, conversely, articles submitted late in 2022 may have received their first decision in 2023; also, some bimonthly submissions were not peer reviewed (eg, Surgeon General's Perspective and Executive Perspective). The time to first decision was a mean (range) of 30 days and a median (IQR) of 20 days.…”

“…These values represent a stable or somewhat worsened mean time to first decision as compared with 2021 (24 d) and some worsening of the median time (14 d). Articles with a long time to first decision (ie, those in the top 25%) were delayed because of the same reasons as last year, 4 increase in "other" articles, likely driven by 6 corrigenda (vs 0 in 2021). The change in the number of commentaries was likely due to a spike in the number of submissions in this category in 2021 (the percentage of commentaries was 9.8% in 2020, which is comparable to 2022), which possibly reflects the fact that many early COVID-19 articles, which peaked in 2021, fell in this category as quantitative studies took longer to emerge.…”

“…Journal performance metrics for articles published in volume 137 (January-December 2022) of Public Health Reports, by performance area Data for 2021 are from Kuzmichev et al4 Percentage indicates change of mean from 2021 to 2022. b These data exclude supplements and articles that are not peer reviewed or editor reviewed, such as Surgeon General's Perspective articles, Executive Perspective articles, and other nonreviewed submissions (eg, In Memoriam, Public Health Reports: 2020 in Review, Public Health Reports in 2021: Impact Factor Increase and New Article Collections on Racism and COVID-19, Acknowledgment of Reviewers, and Corrigenda). However, these data do include contributions to the departments of Law and the Public's Health and From the Schools and Programs of Public Health.…”

Informing COVID-19 Response and Health Equity Agenda: Collection of Public Health Reports Articles on Emerging Viral Epidemics in the United States, 1878-2021

“…17 We included a health disparities coding category, which was defined as in PHR's 2020 and 2021 Year in Review articles. 18,19 We based inclusion criteria on a Healthy People 2020 definition of health disparities, with articles deemed relevant only if they explicitly mentioned a health outcome seen to a greater or lesser extent among various populations by race and ethnicity, age, sex/gender identity, residence in urban versus rural area, socioeconomic status, immigrant status, veteran status, or disability. [20][21][22] We excluded articles that presented patterns of health differences by age, race and ethnicity, or another disparity category without explicit focus on observed differences.…”

“…23 The most common and most cited capability was public health surveillance and epidemiologic investigation, reflecting the fact that PHR was responsible for disseminating national health statistics prior to MMWR and its historical focus on disease surveillance. 19 Articles on nonpharmaceutical interventions had the most citations per article, likely because of a recent discussion of such interventions for COVID-19 (eg, social distancing, face mask wearing). Low citation numbers in such categories as community recovery, information sharing, and public health laboratory testing reflect the fact that these categories are geared more toward public health practice than academic research, which primarily drives PubMed citations.…”