Yesterday we had our editorial board meeting for Child Abuse Review. It was encouraging to reflect on how the journal has been going and think about how we can make it even better for our readers and our authors.
Improving our readers’ experience
Child Abuse Review has always prided itself in publishing high quality research that is relevant to practitioners, accessible and readable. So it was encouraging to hear from our publishers that our article downloads have increased another 3% last year to nearly 80,000 from across the globe. We are always looking for ways to improve what we produce and how, so if you have any ideas do let us know. One particularly successful initiative last year was to produce a virtual issue on Child Protection in Nordic Countries, 
available freely for a short time. This has been followed by one on child sexual abuse and children’s rights, and others now in the pipeline:
- Children’s oral health and wellbeing
- Child sexual exploitation
- Parental mental health problems
Keep an eye on the website for details of those, or sign up for our free contents alerts.
The number of full-text downloads for articles published in the journal has also increased this year, with our top 10 articles receiving an average of over 1,000 downloads:
Top 10 most downloaded articles in 2015
- M. Stoltenborgh et al. The prevalence of child maltreatment across the globe
- J. Pearce. ‘What’s going on’ to safeguard children and young people from child sexual exploitation
- J. Appleton. Child sexual exploitation, victimisation and vulnerability
- M. Brandon et al. The role of neglect in child fatality and serious injury
- K. Stalker & K. McArthur. Child abuse, child protection and disabled children
- B. Daniel. Why have we made neglect so complicated?
- C. Humphreys & C. Bradbury-Jones. Domestic abuse and safeguarding children
- H. Brayley & E. Cockbain. British children can be trafficked too
- P. Sidebotham. The challenge and complexities of physical abuse
- E. Howarth et al. The effectiveness of targeted interventions for children exposed to domestic violence
Improving our author’s experience
As well as seeing increases in our readership, we have worked really hard to improve our turnaround times so we can get cutting edge research published as quickly as possible. So it was good to see that our publishers have managed to reduce the average turnaround time from acceptance to on-line Early View publication from 325 to 129 days. We will keep working on this as we would really like to get it down to less than 60 days. Meanwhile we have also seen huge improvements in our peer review and editorial decisions, with 52% of submitted papers receiving a decision within 60 days and 92% within 120 days. Unfortunately improvements in the quality and volume of submitted papers mean that we are now able to accept less than half of those papers submitted, but we do work hard with submitting authors to give feedback and ensure that the papers we publish are of the highest standard and accessible and useful to our readers.
So thank you to all our readers and authors, to our reviewers and our editorial team. Do let us know if there are things we can do to make the journal even better. And if you aren’t yet a reader, why not have a browse, or join BASPCAN and get all the privileges of membership including subscription to the journal.