Abstract
Since the April 2022 restart of Rejuvenation Research, our journal has improved in the impact of submitted and published articles. A few notable mentions include the work by the Ok Hee Jeon group and the research by Iryna Pishel and colleagues.
The Jeon group has identified a potential systemic link between infertility and senescence, which has broad implications for biomedicine of health and longevity. 1
The article by the Pishel group provides key evidence for a lack of lifespan extension of old mice, with a concomitant decline of lifespan of young mice, after the animals were joined in heterochronic parabiosis and then disconnected (see pages 191–199 this issue).
This research article is particularly laudable, because Dr. Pishel, who is a professor at Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, composed it from data already in place, as a war refugee. We hope that the work of Iryna and her colleagues will soon resume in much better conditions and yield more scientific breakthroughs.
The goal of Rejuvenation Research continues to be on publishing high-impact scientific discovery, which with an accurate referencing by others should in theory reflect to the impact of the journal. In this regard, based on the Academic Accelerator, our current real-time impact factor is 5.5, 2 which is an upward trend from the impact factor of 3, which reflects the past 2–3 years of Rejuvenation Research.
Our thoughts for incentivizing submission of excellent articles circle around an award for the best article(s) of the year, and possibly even dedicated research funding to move forward the best work that has been published in Rejuvenation Research!
Caught in a prisoner's dilemma, the scientific community understands that it would be more beneficial for us as a group to consider the impact of each article and not weight the impact of the journal so heavily. In other words, in evaluating what has been published, the parameter of where it was published should be insignificant. But by precedent and the status of affairs, the focus remains on striving to publish in so-called high-impact journals, because we continue to heavily weight the name of the journal when considering scientific accomplishments.
This comes at a price to the critical thinking and review of science; as mentioned, research scientists are much better trained in evaluating what was published rather than the merit of where it was published. At the same time, it is much easier to simply count the journals and their ranks, for which no scientific expertise is really needed.
This situation might also compromise the psychological health of researchers, in the stressful choosing between timely publication and what journal to court. To continue with a variation of the prisoner's dilemma, on one hand, there is a need to keep satisfying the editors and reviewers, at times against better scientific judgment, in a long and depressing loop of replies and resubmissions to a “top” journal. On the other hand, the same work can be published much faster in another journal, but would it be considered equally meritorious?
Again, the objective of Rejuvenation Research is to publish great science and to make sure that it is well recognized.