Expanding our editorial capacity

Long-standing readers of Nutrition Bulletin may have noticed a change in the balance of articles that are now published in the journal, with a much higher proportion of original research in our offering than a few years ago. Some may have wondered why we have decided to become ‘yet another’ nutrition journal and whether we are in danger of losing our distinctive niche of being an interface between the interests of nutritionists in research, health promotion, clinical settings, policy, education and those working in the food industry. And the truth is that while we are keen to continue to occupy that particular niche, the publishing landscape is constantly evolving and we recognise the need to adapt to meet the change towards more open access and more international publishing. While invited, well-written, concise reviews of topical areas of research are still an important part of our offering, it has become increasingly necessary that our invited authors gain suitable recognition for their efforts. Our recent acquisition of an Impact Factor in 2021 and then, last year, the inclusion of Nutrition Bulletin in the US National Library of Medicine's database, Medline therefore, has meant that we remain an attractive journal for authors to reach a broad and diverse audience, beyond those just working in academia. Inclusion in Medline has also meant that the number of submissions to the journal has increased, particularly of original research, and is on course to double this year compared to 2021. We are also pleased that a higher proportion of submissions are coming from countries beyond the United Kingdom and Europe. Much of this is interesting research, relevant to our increasingly global readership and addressing issues of global concern such as the changes to food systems necessary to meet planetary challenges. We are keen to make this research available to our readers. Nevertheless, the changing publishing landscape has also brought new challenges to the role of journal editors. Increasing international submissions means that many authors are not writing in their first language and so more editorial work is required to present their findings clearly and concisely. However, this also makes the task of spotting and filtering out articles by papermills more challenging since it is not always easy to discern whether something is just poorly worded English or a ‘tortured phrase’, in the words of Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé and Alexander Magazinov (Cabanac et al., 2022). These phrases, probably generated by automated paraphrasing tools in order to avoid anti-plagiarism software, are used in place of standard terms. They include terms such as ‘mean square blunder’ in place of ‘mean square error’ and ‘counterfeit consciousness’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence’. In addition, the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) tools such as ChatGPT, which are rapidly becoming adept at writing whole scientific papers, will make the problem of identifying papers from papermills even harder (Anderson et al., 2023; Flanagin et al., 2023; Grimaldi & Ehrler, 2023). However, it seems these tools still have some way to go as yet though. Nutrition Bulletin recently received a submission which included meaningless phrases such as ‘the length of one week around the waist is the waist circumference’ and ‘nitrogenating injury to their bodies’. Given that the author's most recent publication was on electrical conductivity in nanocomposites, we felt confident that this was a papermill paper, possibly generated by an AIGC tool! However, such papers are not always so easy to spot, and it takes time to do the necessary background checks. While the use of AIGC tools such as ChatGPT will make the task of writing papers easier, and for those for whom English is not their first language, will increase their access to publishing in English language journals, Nutrition Bulletin, along with other Wiley journals, has recently added a statement to its Author Guidelines that these tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper. This is because such tools cannot be accountable for a published work or for research design, which is a generally held requirement of authorship, nor do they have legal standing or the ability to hold or assign copyright. However, they may be used by authors in the development of an article if their use is described transparently and in detail in the Methods or the Acknowledgements section. Authors remain responsible for the accuracy and correct referencing of any information generated by the tool. Another challenge for editors is the increasing difficulty of finding suitable peer reviewers (Dance, 2023; Seife, 2023). With over 4 million scholarly papers published in 2020, Aczel et al. estimated that journal editors need to look for nearly 22 million peer reviews for submitted papers every year, taking into account papers that are eventually rejected (Aczel et al., 2021). Many academics find that the numerous other competing demands on their time, such as writing grant proposals, teaching and writing their own papers push peer review lower and lower down their list of priorities. While several suggestions for improving the peer review process have been proposed, including widening the peer reviewer pool to include more reviewers from developing countries or paying peer reviewers, either directly or in kind, for example with waivers for article publication charges, the fact remains that from an editor's point of view, it is taking longer to find the necessary number of reviewers for a paper. These two challenges, along with the drive towards more open-access publishing, which means that our subscription income is falling, mean that the Editorial Advisory Board of Nutrition Bulletin has agreed that it is necessary to expand our editorial capacity and increase the number of articles that we publish each year. We are, therefore, delighted that three up-and-coming UK research scientists have agreed to come on board as Associate Editors of Nutrition Bulletin. They are Dr Eirini Dimidi from King's College London, Dr Sarah Jing Guo from the University of Leeds and Dr Kathryn Hart from the University of Surrey. Dr Eirini Dimidi is a registered dietitian and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Nutritional Sciences, King's College London. She leads research on nutrition-based interventions, including fibre, plant foods, prebiotics, probiotics and the low FODMAP diet, in gastrointestinal health and disease, and the gut-brain axis. Dr Dimidi was awarded the 2022 ISAPP Glenn Gibson Early Career Research Prize and the 2021 Rising Star and 2020 Elizabeth Washington awards by the British Dietetic Association for her research work. She was announced as the 2017 Postgraduate Competition Winner from the UK Nutrition Society and was selected as the UK nominee for the 2018 International Early Career Nutrition Research Championship. Dr Sarah Jing Guo is a UK registered nutritionist and a Lecturer in Nutrition and Public Health at the University of Leeds. Her main areas of research interest are nutritional epidemiology studies and human intervention studies on the association between dietary pattern, diet or nutrients and chronic disease risk; food fortification and biofortification as potential strategies for prevention of nutrient deficiency (e.g. vitamin D) and science communication. She won the Drummond Early Career Scientist Award (2018) from the British Nutrition Foundation and the Postgraduate Award (2017) from the Nutrition Society. Dr Kathryn Hart is a research dietitian and Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey with a passion for improving the management of under-researched clinical populations and for the collection of accurate and robust dietary data to classify nutritional status, evaluate interventions and develop guidelines. She is an experienced teacher across all levels from undergraduate to Continuing Professional Development for practising health professionals, who is passionate about the communication of up-to-date science and scientific methods. Her specialisms are nutrition in early life and dietary assessment supporting collaboration across a wide range of fields and topics including health economics, psychology, obstetrics and AI. All three will bring their considerable expertise to the editing of papers submitted to Nutrition Bulletin and we are confident they will further improve the quality of papers published in the journal. As Jared Spool, a well-known information architecture designer said of good design, good editing ‘when it is done well, becomes invisible – it's only when it is done poorly that we notice it’. While their work may be invisible, we anticipate that it will help to make Nutrition Bulletin a ‘go-to’ journal for the nutrition research community in the United Kingdom and abroad. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.