We are excited to introduce our 2 new Associate Editors to the readers of the Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing: Victoria Vaughan Dickson, PhD, CRNP, FHFSA, FAHA, FAAN, and Todd Ruppar, PhD, RN, GCNS-BC, FAHA. Both of our new Associate Editors bring experience as members of the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, previous experience in making editorial decisions, and commitment to the Preventive Cardiovascular Nursing Association and the American Heart Association, our affiliated organizations. As described hereinafter, they bring unique methodological expertise that will facilitate our commitment to publishing methodologically sound research, regardless of the methods used.
Dr Dickson is an associate professor in the Rory Meyers College of Nursing of New York University (NYU) and a nurse practitioner with a clinical appointment in the division of cardiology at the NYU Langone Medical Center and the Bellevue Hospital. Dr Dickson's program of research focuses on investigating biobehavioral influences on self-care in patients with cardiovascular disease with a focus on heart failure and evaluating the effectiveness of self-care interventions on health outcomes. Her work has led to an improved understanding of the sociocultural influences of self-care among vulnerable populations including older workers, women, and ethnic minority groups and the development of innovative theory-based interventions. Dr Dickson is recognized internationally as an expert in qualitative research techniques and mixed methods research and has trained interdisciplinary teams all over the world.
Dr Ruppar is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Associate Professor of Nursing at Rush University College of Nursing. He is an internationally recognized expert on medication adherence. His research uses both meta-analysis and clinical research methods to quantify the various influences on adherence to cardiovascular medications and to then improve patient outcomes by developing effective interventions through which patients and providers can work together to address medication nonadherence.
Editors talk among themselves about the need for consistency, fairness, and experience in the process of making editorial decisions. We have taken these discussions to heart and organized a training system to ensure consistency among the four of us in our editorial decisions. Thus, we anticipate that you will see little difference in the ease of submission, the rapidity of our editorial decisions, and the quality of the content published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing.
Submissions are routinely assigned to an editor within a day, and the editor makes a decision about whether or not to send the submission out for review, on average, in 2 days. In those articles that are chosen for review, the time to a first decision is about 51 days. Once accepted, we publish all articles ahead of print within 100 days. We went through a period with a significant backlog in getting articles published, but we have finally dealt with that issue, and our time from the final decision to publication in a specific issue (print or online) is now down to 8 months and anticipated to shorten with more people choosing online publication. These successes have allowed us to increase our acceptable manuscript page limits to 3500 words, from 2800 words.
We continue to be ranked as one of the top 10 nursing journals in the world with an impact factor of 2.097 and a ranking of 9 of 118 for nursing publications and 70 of 128 for all publications in cardiac and cardiovascular systems, regardless of discipline. For all the reasons mentioned previously, we hope you will think about the Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing for your best cardiovascular research!
Barbara Riegel and Debra K. Moser, Editors.