The Professional Animal Scientist continues to improve visibility among scientists. We are receiving statistical information regarding readers and citations that was not available previously. Some of this information is provided from our publisher Elsevier. The journal is available to members of ARPAS (just enter the ARPAS site, log in, and click on the Professional Animal Scientist) on the HealthAdvance website (www.professionalanimalscientist.org), and usage increased in the first half of 2017, compared to 2016. In 2016 the average number of monthly downloads was 989. For 2017, the average monthly downloads increased to 1,392. Via a separate website, we also observed an increase in usage by institutional users in 2017 compared with previous months. Earlier this year the papers with the most full-article downloads by institutional subscribers were the symposium paper “Transportation issues affecting cattle well-being and considerations for the future” and the research article “Management characteristics of beef cattle production in the Northern Plains and Midwest regions of the United States” (both from the December 2016 issue).
In March 2017, the marketing team at Elsevier arranged a campaign to promote the top five most downloaded articles from PAS. The following articles were freely available until the June 1: “The roles of forage management, forage quality, and forage allowance in grazing research” by F. M. Rouquette Jr.; “Getting more information from your grazing research beyond cattle performance”, by Stacey A. Gunter and N. Andy Cole; “Designing a grazing experiment that can reliably detect meaningful differences,” by R. R. Reuter and C. A. Moffet; “Comparison of 3 alternatives for large-scale processing of animal carcasses and meat by-products,” by Charles H. Gooding and David L. Meeker; and “Effects of growth promoting implant strategies on performance of pre- and postweaned beef calves,” by H. Brad Jones et al. These articles were highlighted in an email campaign (which was sent to authors that have recently published in PAS and in other relevant animal science journals published by Elsevier). The articles were also highlighted in banner advertisements on the animal science journal home pages and in social media (on the ElsevierVetNews, Twitter, and Facebook accounts). We are hopeful that the publicity will result in additional citations for all of our articles.
The first four issues of the 33rd volume of The Professional Animal Scientist contained five review articles on stress-induced inflammation, matching forage issues with cow size, bermudagrass pastures over-seeded with annual grasses and legumes, issues facing cow-calf and stocker producers, and advantages and limitations of dairy efficiency measures. An additional three reviews are planned for the October issue.
The 2017 October issue is nearing completion with 13 articles. The first four issues of volume 33 contained 508 pages compared with 530 pages in 2016—which was a record year. Based on page numbers, we appear to have made the transition to a new publisher successfully. The average of the previous five years (2011 to 2015) was 439 pages in the first four issues.
Our application for inclusion in PubMed is being submitted by Elsevier. Part of the application involves including a statement regarding conflicts of interest that will appear in future issues. Also, Elsevier is generating an in-house citation index for The Professional Animal Scientist, which may be helpful to many of our authors. Information about citations of individual articles is already available on the website.
I really appreciate the support of the governing board, especially as we improved the technology and eventually changed publishers. Volume 32 (2016) of the journal was completed with 873 pages, the largest volume to date. By comparison, the previous volume had 607 pages, and the 10-year average was 677 pages. I want to thank many people who made the year so successful, especially the authors who conducted the research, submitted the manuscripts, made the revisions, and approved the final page proofs! I really appreciate the essential role that our expert reviewers—including many on the editorial board—had in appraising the manuscripts. Both associate editors, Andy Cole and Stacey Gunter, worked with authors and reviewers in refining the articles. Christine Horger, technical editor, and other FASS staff members were involved in preparing the page proofs. Finally, Emma Bruun and the staff of Elsevier published the issues.