2025 JCRP Year in Review

This year has been another productive and exciting year for the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention. I have to first thank our editorial team including our associate editors (Theresa Beckie, Jerome Fleg, Gabriela Lima de Melo Ghisi, Joel Hughes, Steven Keteyian, Patrick Savage, Daniel Stevens, and Jenna Taylor), our digital media editor (Brittany Overstreet), statistical editor (Holmes Finch), managing editor (Kate Maude), and our editorial board. Your work and dedication are critical to the success of the Journal, and I greatly appreciate each of your impressive contributions. The volume of submissions to the Journal continues to increase. In 2024, we set a record with 383 submissions which exceeded the COVID-19 years of 2020 and 2021 where we saw a significant uptick in submissions. We continue to see this pattern continue. In mid-September, we were already approaching 300 submissions, and we expect that we will likely exceed 400 submissions this year. As such, our acceptance rate for articles continues to go down and was 18% in 2024. We are receiving many well-done studies and simply cannot publish them all. The Journal continues to compare favorably to similar journals in the field ranking in the 70th percentile for Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems journals. I have listed our top cited manuscripts for issues 43 and 44 in Table 1. Table 1 - Most Frequently Cited Articles, 2023-2024 Author Title Year Citationsa Ehrman et al1 Supervised exercise therapy for symptomatic peripheral artery disease: A review Of Current Experience And Practice-Based Recommendations 2023 22 Platz et al2 Benefits, facilitators, and barriers of alternative models of cardiac rehabilitation: A qualitative systematic review 2023 21 Kerrigan et al3 Cardiac rehabilitation improves fitness in patients with subclinical markers of cardiotoxicity while receiving chemotherapy: A randomized controlled study 2023 18 Murphy et al4 Prevalence of anxiety, depression, and distress in SCAD and Non-SCAD AMI patients 2023 17 Smer et al5 Cardiac complications of COVID-19 infection and the role of physical activity 2023 16 Edward et al6 Characteristics and treatment of exercise intolerance in patients with long COVID 2023 10 Brewer et al7 A community-informed virtual world-based cardiac rehabilitation program as an extension of center-based cardiac rehabilitation: Mixed-methods analysis of a multicenter pilot study 2023 10 Arena et al8 Introducing the Lifestyle Health Index in the American nations 2024 9 Farcier et al9 Quantifying improvement in V̇O2peak and exercise thresholds in cardiovascular disease using reliable change indices 2024 9 Shi et al10 Effectiveness of telehealth cardiac rehabilitation programs on health outcomes of patients with coronary heart diseases 2024 9 Kunutsor et al11 The interplay between systolic blood pressure, cardiorespiratory fitness, and mortality risk: A prospective cohort study 2023 9 Kunutsor et al12 Percentage of age-predicted cardiorespiratory fitness may be a stronger risk indicator for incident type 2 diabetes than absolute levels of cardiorespiratory fitness 2023 9 aNumber of citations as of August 30, 2025. As I previously mentioned, we are dependent on our editorial board members and other reviewers to provide high quality and timely peer review for the Journal. The associate editors of the Journal and I want to recognize those that go above and beyond in their service to the Journal. This year we want to recognize those reviewers who reviewed 6 or more articles in the 12 months from September 1, 2024 to August 31, 2025. We have listed these “master reviewers” in Table 2. Table 2 - JCRP Top Reviewers for 2025 Abraham Babu Gerene Bauldoff Robert Berry Clinton Brawner Diann Gaalema Emily Gathright Nathan Hellyer Neil MacIntyre Michael Thompson Andrew Oehler Cemal Ozemek Ash Walker As we conclude this exciting year, I want to thank you for your interest and support of the Journal. Thank you for considering us for your research in cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation and prevention. I am looking forward to what I hope will be another successful year in 2026.