• Occupational health practice

The year just ended was a good one for OEM, with sustained progress on several indicators of the Journal's success. The Impact Factor continued its upward climb, rising from 3.30 for citations in 2008 to 3.64 for 2009 citations—a 10% increase. OEM now ranks 14^th in its category and is the only occupational health specialty journal in the top 20.1

The most cited research papers of 2009 covered a wide range of topics in environmental and occupational health, including mobile phones,2 ,3 solvents and childhood leukaemia,4 asbestos and lung cancer,5 and disparities in occupational injury rates,6 demonstrating the Journal's diversity.

Contributions to the Journal also continued to increase in 2010. A year ago we reported a 30% jump in submissions from 2008 to 2009.7 Although the final tally wasn't known when this was written, we expect to have received close to 800 papers by year's end, making the increase relative to 2009 around 10%—smaller than the previous year's, but still substantial.

The steady growth in submissions means that publishing in OEM becomes more competitive every year. We reject more than half of all contributions instantly—usually within a week—and in 2010 the acceptance rate dropped below 20%. We are now in the position of rejecting very good papers that are technically sound, useful and interesting, and some of these will have been favourably reviewed by outside experts. Authors often wonder why we don't pursue such papers. The simple answer is that we expect them to have lesser impact, but “lesser” impact isn't the same as low impact; with submissions arriving at the current rate, we must turn away papers that are likely to be read with interest and cited.

Despite the increase in submissions, by most indicators we are serving authors better by handling papers more quickly. The average time from submission to a first decision dropped to 24 days (from 29 in 2009), while the mean time from submission to acceptance is down to 100 days (from 144). These numbers show that our editorial team is handling papers more efficiently than ever before. By one measure we have not done as well, however: the average time to complete all reviews increased 16% over 2009, from 37 to 43 days. We think most of this increase is associated with a fraction of papers that are declined by multiple reviewers. We are grateful to our reviewers for their role in maintaining the Journal's standards, but they volunteer their time and more submissions mean more work for reviewers. It wouldn't be surprising if requests for reviews were declined more often as the workload increases.

In addition to improving the Journal's statistics, we launched three new initiatives in 2010. The first article in our new Cochrane Corner series highlighting systematic reviews from the Cochrane Occupational Health Field was published in November8 with an accompanying editorial by the series editor, Jos Verbeek, describing the Cochrane Collaboration, which grew from Archie Cochrane's vision in the 1970s of rational, evidence-based health care.9

We also introduced the OEM Blog. This new service is intended as a forum for the occupational and environmental health community to publicise and debate current issues. We post correspondence, announcements and commentary to the blog and invite readers to contribute. If you haven't yet seen the blog, it's available at http://blogs.bmj.com/oem/.

Finally, we added new features to Online First publication, making papers available in their fully typeset, final form available from their first electronic publication. An initial backlog generated by this change has been cleared, and we now expect papers to be published online within a few weeks of their acceptance.

We are proud to report that OEM continues to be the leading international journal for research in occupational health, and that our presence in environmental health is increasing. In 2011, we hope to keep the Journal moving on the same upward track by publishing high-quality, high-impact research and providing still better service to the research community.