Wildlife Biology - status at the beginning of 2002
I am happy to report that Wildlife Biology is doing well. Our journal is becoming more known, as is evident from the increase in manuscripts - a 33% increase from 2000 to 2001 and a 60% increase from 1999 to 2001.
Our Nordic Council for Wildlife Research (NKV) Advisory Board has authorised us to increase the size of the quarterly numbers from 64 to 80 pages, when necessary, to accommodate the increased number of articles. This will entail increased costs also, which will be covered by an increased grant from the NKY and a modest increase in the subscription price.
Even with this increase in the size of Wildlife Biology, the increase in the number of manuscripts will probably also mean an increase in the rejection rate which has averaged 45% during the years 1998–2000. This should increase the quality of our published articles even more.
Other important statistics are the time lapse from submission to first notification of the result to the author which has averaged 4 months, and the time from submission to final decision following revisions by the authors which has averaged 8.2 months during 1998 – 2000. The time from acceptance of the final draft to publishing has averaged 6.8 months during this period.
The statistic that most readers are interested in is our impact factor. We have been informed that our first factor will be listed in the 2001 Journal Citation Reports (JCR), Science Edition, which is to be published in the middle of 2002.
We have decided to add another forum to Wildlife Biology, to encourage a new category of articles. This forum is called ‘Current Management’ and is a forum for promoting the dissemination of information about current management problems or systems, and evaluations of the effects of management programmes. We encourage wildlife managers to submit manuscripts to this forum, and are happy to publish the first article in this category ‘Hunting legislation in the Carpathian Mountains: implications for the conservation and management of large carnivores’ on pages 3–10 in this issue.
Due to the increasing manuscript load and increasing variety of subjects submitted to Wildlife Biology, we have recently added several new Associate Editors, and we welcome Jon A. Arnemo, Alistair Bath, Joel Berger, Marco Festa-Bianchet, Anne Loison and Henryk Okarma to our staff.
