Signa Vitae. 2022; 18(1): 1-2. doi: 10.22514/sv.2022.001
Editorial

How challenges made us stronger

Giustino Varrassi1,*,

1Paolo Procacci Foundation, Via Tacito 7, 00193 Rome, Italy

*Corresponding Author(s):giuvarr@gmail.com (Giustino Varrassi)

History Submitted: 16 December 2021 | Accepted: 20 December 2021 | Published: 08 January 2022
Copyright:  ©2022  The Author(s). Published by MRE Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Giustino Varrassi. How challenges made us stronger. Signa Vitae. 2022; 18(1): 1-2. doi: 10.22514/sv.2022.001

One year ago, Signa Vitae management invited me to become Editor-in-Chief of this interesting and intriguing journal. At that moment, the world was still suffering from the terrible pandemic of COVID-19, many professional initiatives were shutting down, and so many colleagues were revising their personal objectives. Most academic publishers were having trouble keeping up with normal activities. Everyone had to make major adaptations in their work and home life. This was a stimulating time—for some of us, the challenges to adapt ourselves to the pandemic were exciting new opportunities, but for others, it was a time of loss and restriction. At Signa Vitae, we welcomed the work, difficult as it was on some days. As it is well known, work is an excellent gym to exercise the intelligence, and hard work even under difficult conditions can still bring big rewards.

What happened with Signa Vitae in the last 12 months is the best evidence of the previous assertion. In a moment of general crisis, we (the Editorial Team) inherited a journal with many problems, few submissions, organizational troubles, and an impact factor that was close to zero (0.338). We accepted this challenge and worked intensively, because we saw opportunities in this critical moment.

In 2021 Signa Vitae has increased all the numbers: submissions, publications, references, and impact factor. In Table 1 there are a few examples.

Table 1.Some of the indicators.
Items20202021
ArticlesSubmitted: 384Submitted: 590
Accepted: 120Accepted: 180
Published: 120Published: 180
Number of issues26
Special Issues2741
Authors6642158
Citations140*204 (Data at 10 December 2021)**
Impact Factor*0.6300.750 (Real time, Data at 10 December 2021)**
*Data from JCR, **Data from WoS.

The 10 most-viewed published articles represent an interesting aspect in the evolution of the journal. There has been a phenomenal increase with over 35,700 views per month, having Nardelli et al. [1] at the peak with 18,986 views. Immediately after that paper, there are all the other nine [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Most of them are related to COVID-19 and its impact on the health care systems. A further important impact on the scientific community is represented by the 10 most downloaded papers published this year.

One clear indicator of interest is the number of citations, demonstrating the huge increase in the impact of the journal on the scientific community. Not only did we stay in publication, we were growing in influence. Based on these numbers, the impact factor of the journal is going to be over 1 in a short time (108 published papers and 204 citations, this year) (Fig. 1), even if the real-time impact factor on web of science (WoS) is 0.750 (Table 1). It is difficult to overstate the importance of this metric.

Times cited and publications over time. Data from WoS.

Fig. 1.Times cited and publications over time. Data from WoS.

The articles published in 2021 have already been cited several times. The most cited is Nioi et al. [11], which shows the huge interest of the scientific community in COVID-19 and its consequences on the health care.

With the wind in our sails, we are sailing towards a 2022 full of further challenges and successes. For this. we thank our loyal readers, all the expert and generous reviewers that have increased the quality of the submitted manuscripts, the editors strongly supporting the editorial activities, and all the authors who, increasingly numerous, continue to trust Signa Vitae.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Acknowledgment

The author acknowledges the Paolo Procacci Foundation for the support in the editorial activities.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Conflict of interest

The author declares no conflict of interest. He is serving as Editor in Chief of this journal.

References

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