Annual Reports

 

ACS - Journal of Environmental Quality Editorial Board (ACS324.1)

2018 Annual Report

• Martin Burge
• Mindy Spiehs
• John Kelly
• Célia Manaia
• Nikolina Udikovic-Kolic
• Qingli Ma
• Bryan M. Spears
• Tiequan Zhang
• Laura E. Christianson
• Erica Donner

JEQ Best Paper Award

• 2018: 4 with 58 papers

 

Special Collections of Papers Published in 2018

Soil Chemistry and the One Health Initiative (10 papers)

Editors: Tsutomu Ohno, Ganga M. Hettiarachchi

 

Microbial water quality:  monitoring and modeling  (23 papers)

Editors: Yakov Pachepsky, Laurie Boithias, Kyunghwa Cho, Robert Jamieson Ana Prieto Allende

 

Predicting Soil Organic Carbon in Agroecosystems under Climate Change  (21 papers)

Editors: Hero Gollany, Richard Farrell, Maria Villamil

 

Environmental Indicators (4 papers)

Editors: Tiequan Zhang

 

Special Collections expected in 2019:

Buffer Strip Effectiveness for Sediment and Nutrient retention, Enhancing Biodiversity, Planning and Public Preferences

Editors: Marc Stutter, Brian Kronvang and Joachim Rozemeijer

 

Agricultural Water Quality in Cold Environments

Guest Editors: Jian Liu, Helen Baulch, Jane Elliott, Merrin Macrae, and Henry Wilson

 

System-level Nutrient Pollution Control Strategies

Guest Editors: Mazdak Arabi, James Mihelcic, and James Shortle

 

Alkaline Extraction of Soils and Natural Waters to Understand Environmental Processes

Guest Editors: Nik Qafoku, Nancy Hess, and Garrison Sposito

 

Celebrating the 350th Anniversary of Discovering Phosphorus—For Better or Worse

Guest Editors: Andrew Sharpley, Peter Kleinman, and Don Flaten

 

Global Research Alliance N2O Chamber Methodology Guidelines

Guest Editors: Rod Venterea, Cecile de Klein, Mike Harvey, Søren Petersen, Tim Clough

 

JEQ’s impact factor

The journal’s impact factor for 2017 increased slightly to 2.405 from 2.344 in 2016. The 5-year impact factor went down slightly to 2.962 from 2.987 (see graph below for the trends in JEQ’s Impact Factor and Cite Score). It is ranked in the top 40% of all ‘environmental science’ journals published (241 total).

Other journal metrics such as Google Scholar’s h5 index show that JEQ is quite strong relative to other journals.  JEQ has an h5 index of 38, and it ranks 7^th out of 20 soil science journals. JEQ’s Cite Score (2.54) puts it among the top 15% of journals in the category of water science and technology.

 

JEQ Impact Factor (2013-2017)

Year	Total Cites (rank)		Impact Factor (rank)
2017	14,507		2.405 (100 of 241)
2016	14,211		2.344 (89 of 229)
2015	13622		2.238 (87 of 225)
2014	13085		2.652 (63 of 223)
2013		12744		2.345 (76 of 215)

 

5-year Impact Factor

• 2017: 2.962
• 2016: 2.986
• 2015: 2.924
• 2014: 2.972
• 2013: 2.694

Developing new special collections of papers

Some of the most highly cited/downloaded papers in JEQ are in special collections; hence they are important to the journal. I encourage you to consider suggesting or leading the organization of a special collection, especially if you are participating in or attending a scientific meeting, symposium or workshop in your area of expertise. Please forward your ideas and suggestions to me.

Increasing the visibility and promoting JEQ articles

Improving the visibility of JEQ articles will raise awareness of environmental science and our scientific disciplines. Science Communications Editor Laura Christianson is in charge of overseeing which JEQ papers to publicize to the general public or scientific community. There is a feature in Manuscript Central that appears on the dashboard at the final recommendation stage. It allows you to flag an article for promotion when you make a final decision. It is here that you can add a few sentences to describe the importance of the research and why the paper should be promoted.

JEQ has a Twitter account (@jenvironqual). Follow JEQ if you’re on Twitter and please retweet messages.Also, send your ideas and comments about articles or scientific issues in JEQ to Ann Edahl to tweet and/or post on Facebook.

 

Manuscript reviews

Reviewers – how to find them

Finding suitable reviewers can be difficult sometime and I often hear from AEs who invite a number of reviewers but no one accepts. This can cause long delays in the review process. Contact the TE or me after asking 5 individuals to review a paper without success; we will help you find reviewers.

Reviewers - their role in the evaluation process

The role of a reviewer is not to focus on accepting/rejecting the paper but to give a full critique of the science. JEQ reviewer instructions are found here: https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/files/publications/jeq-reviewer-guidelines.pdf and you should remind your reviewers to look them over, especially those that have recently been recruited.

Reviewing and having good oversight on the quality of abstracts

The quality of abstracts is not consistent across all papers published in JEQ. It is important to carefully review/edit abstracts, particularly to ensure that they contain all the necessary elements (i.e., Rationale, Objectives, Methods, Results, Conclusions). There is a short message on your dashboard in the Comments to the Author box that will serve as a reminder to scrutinize the abstracts to ensure quality and consistency. How you implement the oversight of this is up to you: you can work with your reviewers to suggest revisions to the author, or you can do this directly with the authors yourself.

Core ideas

The author provides these when submitting an article to JEQ through Manuscript Central. They consist of 3-5 bullet point statements that are important findings in the article. Each bullet statement should be less than 85 characters. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to limit the author to a character count in this section in Manuscript Central. Therefore the core ideas should be vetted and reviewed so please watch for these and remind your reviewers to read and evaluate them.

 

Letter to reviewers following manuscript review

Following the review of a manuscript, a decision letter is sent to the authors and copied to the TE and AE who handled the review. A separate letter is sent to all the reviewers to thank them for their help in evaluating the manuscript and inform them of the final decision. This letter includes the comments of the reviewers as well as those of the Associate and Technical Editors and me.  Currently Manuscript Central is set up to show only the comments that are in the review comments box. We are working to solve this glitch so in the meantime please let the reviewers know about this so that their comments can be seen by everyone. Also, please ensure that the reviewers’ identities, and yours, remain anonymous.

 

Outsourcing production, sales and marketing of Tri-Societies journals

Plans are being made to made to outsource journal production, sales and marketing of Tri-Societies journals to Wiley. This outsourcing will benefit the journals through increased worldwide exposure to institutions and researchers. It is understood that this arrangement will keep full editorial control of our content in our hands, with our editorial staff members and there will be almost no difference in the submission, peer review and editing process. For more details see Matt Wascavage’s report below.  

 

Contact information for JEQ  

Ann Edahl, managing editor (aedahl@sciencesocieties.org)

Matt Wascavage, director of publications (mwascavage@sciencesocieties.org)

Abby Morrison, editorial assistant (amorrison@sciencesocieties.org)

Lauren Coleman, submissions manager (lcoleman@sciencesocieties.org)

 

Acknowledgments

The success of JEQ in producing important and timely scientific articles is due to the conscientious and diligent efforts of the JEQ Technical Editors, Associate Editors, and ASA-CSSA-SSSA staff.  We thank the members of the JEQ Editorial Board and ASA-CSSA-SSSA staff for their efforts in maintaining rigorous standards for evaluating, reviewing and editing manuscripts.

Ed Gregorich, Editor

Ann Edahl, Managing Editor

Journal of Environmental Quality

 

January 2019

ACS324.1 Journal of Environmental Quality Editorial Board

 

Managing Editor's Report—Ann Edahl

 

Production

A summary of papers published, total pages, and article length for 2018 compared with previous volumes is presented in Table 1.

 

Table 1. Summary of papers published in JEQ.

Contribution	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013
Reviews and Analyses	6	5	4	1	1	6
Technical Reports	97	120	138	129	148	168
Environmental Issues	3	3	1	2	0	5
Dataset Papers	0	3	–	–	–	–
Technical Notes & Preliminary Communications†	11	13	15	9	6	10
Special Sections	58	31	71	57	57	6
Letters/Replies	0	0	0	2	0	1
Book Reviews	0	0	0	0	2	6
Total pages	1546	1515	2049	1980	2129	1909
	Average page length
Reviews and Analyses	13.2	9.2	12.0	11	20.0	13.8
Technical Reports	8.6	8.7	8.8	9.3	10.1	9.5
Environmental Issues	10	7.3	11	12	–	10.2
Dataset Papers	–	9.7
Technical Notes & Preliminary Communications†	6.9	6.7	6.5	6.1	7.3	6.6
Special Sections	9.2	9.2	9.4	10.2	10.0	9.2

† Formerly Short Communications.

 

Submissions

Table 2 shows the number of submissions in 2018 (January–November) and location of corresponding author.

 

Table 2. Submissions report.

Year	US submissions	International submissions	Total	% International
2018†	149	235	384	61.2%
2017	208	253	461	54.9%
2016	182	284	466	60.9%
2015	256	365	621	58.8%
2014	241	312	553	56.4%
2013	232	298	530	56.2%
2012	234	270	504	53.6%
2011	219	258	477	54.1%

† Year to date (Jan.–Nov. 30).

 

Online Usage Statistics

Table 3 shows the online usage statistics for 2018 (January–September 30).

 

Table 3. Usage statistics for ASA, CSSA, SSSA journals.

Journal	Full-text Downloads (COUNTER)	Abstracts (COUNTER)	Table of Contents (COUNTER)
Agricultural & Environmental Letters	21989	10944	4042
Agronomy Journal	422198	718772	51801
Agrosystems, Geosciences & Environment	2329	485	1778
Crop Science	493768	718911	45585
Crop, Forage and Turfgrass Management	9178	9667	2883
Journal of Environmental Quality	399255	667535	36517
Journal of Plant Registrations	20829	24475	5453
Natural Sciences Education	15670	15165	4425
Soil Science Society of America Journal	442410	859182	37500
The Plant Genome	93437	44584	6218
The Plant Phenome Journal	1208	627	919
Vadose Zone Journal	96740	99914	18446

 

 

Impact Factor

Table 4 shows the impact factor for JEQ from 2011 to 2017.

 

Table 4. Impact factor for JEQ.

 

Impact factor	2017	2016	2015	2014	2013	2012	2011
2-year	2.405	2.344	2.238	2.652	2.345	2.353	2.324
5-year	2.962	2.986	2.924	2.972	2.694	2.599	2.785

 

Promotion and Public Relations Summary

See separate report for magazine promotion in 2018.

 

Journal content was also promoted to the general public through our science communication department as web stories.  Questions regarding these stories can be directed to Laura Christianson, JEQ’s science communications editor.

 

JEQ’s Twitter account, @JEnvironQual, now has more than 770 followers.

 

Headquarters Staff

Contacts: Ann Edahl, managing editor (aedahl@sciencesocieties.org), Matt Wascavage, director of publications (mwascavage@sciencesocieties.org), Abby Morrison, editorial assistant (amorrison@sciencesocieties.org),  Lauren Coleman, submissions manager (lcoleman@sciencesocieties.org), Haley Salazar (tnewell@sciencesocieties.org), publications marketing specialist. We welcomed our new director of publications, Matt Wascavage, in July 2018 and bid farewell and good luck to Bill Cook, who retired at the end of 2018.

 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Ed Gregorich, editor, the technical editors, and associate editors for all your hard work and dedication in helping to publish important science in a great journal.

 

Ann Edahl, Managing Editor, Journal of Environmental Quality

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

From the Director of Publications – Matt Wascavage 

Publications Update – Continuing innovation in the Publications area for 2018

• We have devoted significant resources to researching the benefits of outsourcing journal production, sales and marketing. In January, we solicited proposals from five commercial publishers, responded to their requests for data, and worked with each of them to ensure we obtained accurate proposals. In March and April, we eliminated three of the respondents and in May, we decided to pursue Wiley further. We have been through several iterations of financial projections and contract terms. At the Baltimore meeting in November, we will present a proposal with financial projections to a meeting of the combined boards and request them to approve moving forward with a contract with Wiley.

• In January, we launched our newest journal, Agrosystems, Geoscience, and Environment, edited by Jerry Hatfield, Bill Raun, and David Baltensperger. This is an Open Access journal and is designed to capture content which has been submitted to one of our other journals, but has been released for lack of relevance, because it is out of scope, or other editorial reasons. The journal aims to publish valid science, including research limited in space or time and research resulting in negative results.

• We launched an English language editing service in June to help authors polish their manuscripts and to relieve our volunteers and staff of excessive copy-edit burdens.This system is modeled on the system we designed and established for ASAS in 2016.

• Through September 2018, there have been over 2.3M journal article and book chapter downloads. That compares to 3.5M through October of 2017. The decrease is due to the exit of the ASAS journals from the Digital Library in 2018.

• We had a very successful Editors’ Conference in Madison where we provided an update on AGE (see above) and on the progress of outsourcing production and sales (see above).Harry Vereeken, EIC of VZJ provided an update on the “flip” of that journal to Open Access.The editors discussed the proper use of maps provided by authors and reached the consensus that the journal editors will not require maps to be adjusted for political purposes. The editors discussed a common policy on data availability and continue to work to create a generally accepted policy. The next conference will be in 2019, also in Madison.

• We implemented a policy that each corresponding author have an ORCID to submit a research article. ORCID identifiers help to disambiguate authors with common names and serve as useful links to information such as affiliation and email/phone information that can change over time.

• We are developing a unified training program to provide our editorial boards with a strong foundation of support throughout the year. The training program includes documentation of processes and procedures, best practices, and video resources for editors at all levels. Training will begin in November 2018 and continue through the end of January 2019.

• We have developed journal templates to help authors structure their paper correctly for submission.We will continue to update and improve author resources in 2019.

• We are also working to update manuscript submission web sites to ensure all journals have a system that is functioning to the highest level. Site updates will begin in December and conclude in February of 2019.

• Additionally, we are reviewing the Digital Library web pages and completing updates and making corrections to clarify and clearly communicate access to the content. In conjunction with the refresh of the web pages, the marketing materials for the journals, books and magazines have been updated and provided to all of our worldwide sales agent partners.

• Podcasts: Staff, led by Abby Morrison, designed and created a program to promote the science published in our journals through podcasts. These are now available on iTunes and other services and thousands of downloads have been made. We aim to upload a new podcast approximately once per month.

• Books: The books program continues to draw readers in to the Digital Library, with just under 356,000 book, TOC and chapter downloads in 2018 alone. This past years’ releases, Precision Agriculture Basics and Practical Mathematics for Precision Farming both have debuted well. Precision Agriculture Basics has already brought around $14,000 in hard copy sales since its release in May. Fall has proven to be a very busy time for books, with 5 new books slated to debut before the end of 2018. They are:

• Applied Statistics in Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences (recently debuted in September) 

• Precision Conservation: Geospatial Techniques for Agricultural and Natural Resources Conservation (scheduled to debut at A&C Annual Meeting)

• Bridging Among Disciplines by Synthesizing Soil and Plant Sciences (scheduled to debut at A&C Annual Meeting)

• Fescue Toxicosis, Second Edition (scheduled to debut at A&C Annual Meeting)

• Soil-based Wastewater Treatment (scheduled to debut in November and be available at S meeting)

• Advertising: After many years of decline in advertising pages and revenue, we terminated the contract with our advertising consultant and brought the work in house.Eric Welsh, who is responsible for selling space at the annual meeting and is the corporate liaison, is combining this responsibility with his others.

 

Items Requiring Board Attention:

Members of the Committee:

Ellen Bergfeld (Member, Ex Officio)
Bill Cook (Member, Ex Officio)
Lauren Matthews (Member, Ex Officio)
Matt Wascavage (Member, Ex Officio)
David Myrold (SSSA Editor-in-Chief)
C. Wayne Smith (CSSA Editor-in-Chief)
Edward Gregorich (JEQ Editor)
Eddie Cytryn (JEQ Technical Editor)
Ganga Hettiarachchi (JEQ Technical Editor)
Peter Kleinman (JEQ Technical Editor)
Tsutomu Ohno (JEQ Technical Editor)
Yakov Pachepsky (JEQ Technical Editor)
Rodney Venterea (JEQ Technical Editor)
Laura Christianson (JEQ Science Communications Editor)
Eduardo Alvarez Santos (JEQ Associate Editor)
Barbara Amon (JEQ Associate Editor)
Ray Anderson (JEQ Associate Editor)
Thomas Borch (JEQ Associate Editor)
Mikhail Borisover (JEQ Associate Editor)
Karen Bradham (JEQ Associate Editor)
John Brooks (JEQ Associate Editor)
Anthony Buda (JEQ Associate Editor)
Martin Burger (JEQ Associate Editor)
Samuel Carrick (JEQ Associate Editor)
Zhongqi Cheng (JEQ Associate Editor)
Alex Chow (JEQ Associate Editor)
Laura Christianson (JEQ Associate Editor)
Katelyn Congreves (JEQ Associate Editor)
Kimberly Cook (JEQ Associate Editor)
Curtis Dell (JEQ Associate Editor)
Emmanuel Doelsch (JEQ Associate Editor)
Erica Donner (JEQ Associate Editor)
Donnacha Doody (JEQ Associate Editor)
Kari Dunfield (JEQ Associate Editor)
Lisa Durso (JEQ Associate Editor)
Zachary Easton (JEQ Associate Editor)
Richard Farrell (JEQ Associate Editor)
Donald Flaten (JEQ Associate Editor)
Girisha Ganjegunte (JEQ Associate Editor)
Laura Good (JEQ Associate Editor)
Markus Grafe (JEQ Associate Editor)
Mussie Habteselassie (JEQ Associate Editor)
Thomas Harter (JEQ Associate Editor)
Diederik Jacques (JEQ Associate Editor)
Jaehak Jeong (JEQ Associate Editor)
Laura Johnson (JEQ Associate Editor)
Tim Johnson (JEQ Associate Editor)
John Kelly (JEQ Associate Editor)
Hyunjung Kim (JEQ Associate Editor)
Peter Kopittke (JEQ Associate Editor)
Rong Li (JEQ Associate Editor)
Jian Liu (JEQ Associate Editor)
Terry Loecke (JEQ Associate Editor)
John Lory (JEQ Associate Editor)
Qingli Ma (JEQ Associate Editor)
Merrin Macrae (JEQ Associate Editor)
Bijesh Maharjan (JEQ Associate Editor)
Laure Mamy (JEQ Associate Editor)
Celia Manaia (JEQ Associate Editor)
Richard Muirhead (JEQ Associate Editor)
Rebecca Phillips (JEQ Associate Editor)
Daniel Plaza-Bonilla (JEQ Associate Editor)
Matthew Polizzotto (JEQ Associate Editor)
Heather Preisendanz (JEQ Associate Editor)
Zhiming Qi (JEQ Associate Editor)
Budong Qian (JEQ Associate Editor)
Upendra Sainju (JEQ Associate Editor)
Maxim Schlossberg (JEQ Associate Editor)
Douglas Smith (JEQ Associate Editor)
Michelle Soupir (JEQ Associate Editor)
Bryan Spears (JEQ Associate Editor)
Mindy Spiehs (JEQ Associate Editor)
Ke Sun (JEQ Associate Editor)
David Tarkalson (JEQ Associate Editor)
Mario Tenuta (JEQ Associate Editor)
Saeed Torkzaban (JEQ Associate Editor)
Martin Tsui (JEQ Associate Editor)
Minori Uchimiya (JEQ Associate Editor)
Nikolina Udikovic-Kolic (JEQ Associate Editor)
Tameria Veith (JEQ Associate Editor)
Rota Wagai (JEQ Associate Editor)
Heidi Waldrip (JEQ Associate Editor)
Clinton Williams (JEQ Associate Editor)
Paul Williams (JEQ Associate Editor)
Yu Yang (JEQ Associate Editor)
Samantha Ying (JEQ Associate Editor)
Hailin Zhang (JEQ Associate Editor)
Wei Zhang (JEQ Associate Editor)
Wei Zheng (JEQ Associate Editor)
Xia Zhu-Barker (JEQ Associate Editor)
Ann Edahl (JEQ Journal Manager)

Attachment:

pdf of final report

Prepared By:

Gregorich, Edward G.