JMFT annual report 2022

In last year's annual report I indicated that the flow of manuscripts had begun to taper off midway through 2021. In 2022 this trend continued. As I reflect on my own scholarly productivity at the University of Minnesota, I know that the COVID-19 years took a toll on me and my energy for work. It is almost as if working non-stop for 2 years wore me down…go figure. I'm assuming that the restricted flow of manuscripts that we experienced in 2022 was a reflection of many of us feeling low energy for work and needing a bit of a break from having our laptops opened 24/7. Despite the challenges we've all faced in 2022 and in previous years, JMFT continues to be a go-to journal for the authors and readers of some of the best relationally-oriented clinical research that is being conducted around the world. I am happy to report that overall, the numbers that reflect the health and vitality of the Journal are still in good shape.

Perhaps the most significant thing that happened within the pages of JMFT in 2022 was the continuation of the trend set by my predecessors, to do a decade-review of all the systemic family therapy outcome research. These magnificent and informative articles are in the January 2022 issue of the Journal. I would like to thank each contributing author for their high-quality work that serves to advance the field. Additionally, I'd like to thank Drs. Kendal Holtrop and Andrea Wittenborn of Michigan State University as guest editors for this January issue. Their leadership was unparalleled in helping get authors engaged and producing the final product. I encourage each reader of this report to review the contents of this issue and see where these manuscripts can inform your practice, research, or teaching.

In 2022 (January 1st - December 31st) we received 150 total original submissions, a 16% decrease from the previous year's 179 submissions which was a decrease from 200 in 2020. In my mind, I still attribute these decreases to the after-effects of the pandemic. Despite the overall numbers being down a bit, I believe the quality of the manuscripts we have received is just as high as in previous years. Additionally, I have noticed a marked increase in the number of manuscripts that center the experiences of marginalized populations in family therapy, from both a therapist and client vantage point. I think the George Floyd murder and other such police-lead injustices, the country's current immigration crisis, and the country's political bifurcation all contribute to a social environment that has social justice-oriented MFTs generating more content on populations that have been less represented in our research. I am hopeful that this trend will continue well into the future.

Our acceptance rate in 2022 was 29.2%. This represents a decrease as the acceptance rate in 2021 was 34.33%. Our submissions came from 27 different countries, an increase of 8% from last year's 25 countries. Seeing more international representation means more readers of JMFT and more researchers thinking of JMFT as an appropriate outlet for their work. The time from initial processing by the editorial assistant to a first decision was about 31 days, with approximately half of all submitted manuscripts receiving an initial decision in less than 30 days. I continue to be hopeful that our quick turnaround time will help make JMFT a desirable outlet for those who have previously published with us. JMFT prioritizes manuscripts that focus on both processes and outcomes associated with relationship-oriented clinical approaches. This has become my “elevator speech” when I tell others about the scope and focus of JMFT. We are encouraged to see that more manuscripts are being submitted from outside the United States. We welcome increased submissions from outside of North America and have taken extra steps to work with authors whose native language is not English. Additionally, we are in a continued process of adding more international scholars, who share a systemic outlook on mental health, to the editorial board. If you are one of these scholars please contact the current editor to see how you might qualify for board membership.

The JMFT Doctoral Apprentice Reviewer Program that was instituted by my predecessor, Fred Piercy, has continued. This program plays an important role in socializing the next generation of family therapy scholars. In the last year, 20 graduate students from 11 COAMFTE-accredited doctoral programs provided 27 reviews. Faculty members mentor these apprentice reviewers and provide feedback on the reviewer portion of the peer review process. In addition to this program, the efforts of a very deep and knowledgeable ad hoc reviewer panel help sustain our Journal. There were 59 scholars who agreed to review JMFT manuscripts this past year who are not on the editorial board but provided a total of 90 reviews in 2022. I am grateful for these many unsung professionals who volunteer their time in the peer review process and thereby help to guard the fidelity and trustworthiness of our research base.

Typically, and on a yearly basis, we invite members of the JMFT Advisory Council to help select an article to honor as the “Article of the Year.” This year we've added other members of the editorial board to join in this process. A total of 25 scholars weighed in on the selection process. Each person was asked to rate and rank their top three articles. They were instructed to consider the impact, originality, and quality of the scholarship of each manuscript. I went through last year's published articles and selected seven articles that I believe stand to make “above and beyond” contributions to the field. While each year I consider every article published in JMFT for this honor, this year was a bit different. The January 2022 special issue on outcome research, mentioned earlier, contains 13 of the most well-crafted and informative review manuscripts on a range of topics; each one reporting on the effectiveness of family therapy as a mental health treatment approach. JMFT and AAMFT are committed to doing these ten-year reviews and the authors are hand-selected, the scope of each article was pre-determined, encouraged, and even enforced. Each of these manuscripts reflects quality unmatched in a typical “regular submission” to the journal. For these reasons, these particular articles were excluded from the “Article of the Year” competition. I want to go on record to say that the time, effort, and quality put into these decade-in-review articles certainly warrants them being considered among the very best JMFT has to offer. This is reflected in the number of times these manuscripts have been viewed since being published (to be highlighted later in this report). However, comparing these manuscripts to other “regular submissions” might be a bit like comparing apples and oranges. So, I made the decision to not have these particular manuscripts included in the pool to be judged.

I am pleased to announce that JMFT's 2022 “Article of the Year” is actually a tie between two articles that both got the same number of votes and rankings. In alphabetical order by title these articles are; “The Couple Relationship Scale: A brief measure to facilitate routine outcome monitoring in couple therapy” by Shayne Anderson, Lee Johnson, Richard Miller, and Connor Barham of Brigham Young University and “Family relationships and the interpersonal theory of suicide in a clinically suicidal sample of adolescents” by Quintin Hunt, Stephanie Krauthamer-Ewing, Lindsey Weiler, Feven Ogbaselase, Tai Mendenhall, Jenifer McGuire, Morgan Monet, Roger Kobak and Guy Diamond from Brigham Young University, The University of Minnesota, and Drexel University combined.

A reviewer had this to say about the family relationships and adolescent suicide article by Hunt and his colleagues: “Dr. Hunt's work on understanding suicide within a family framework is a meaningful advancement in our field with strong clinical implications.” Another reviewer said, “I know that MFTs are saving lives every day; we have to learn as much as we can about suicide prevention and contribute our systemic skills and knowledge to positively influence biopsychosocial-relational health.”

There were two other articles that scored high in our ranking exercise and it would be a shame to not share them with our readers as well. Both of these manuscripts are receiving honorable mentions in this year's competition. They are presented here in no specific order. The first is titled, “Affair Recovery: Exploring similarities and differences of injured and involved partners” and was written by Erica Mitchell, Andrea Wittenborn, Tina Timm and Adrian Blow of Michigan State University. One reviewer indicated that this article “…on affair recovery rose to the top given its thoughtful methodology and application to our field immediately. The combination of good science, generalizability of the sample and clinical application were the primary reasons I selected [this] article.”

We at JMFT extend our sincere gratitude to all of these authors for submitting such high-quality writing to the Journal. Further appreciation is extended to the members of the advisory council and editorial board for their service in making recommendations for these awards.

We have an accomplished and respected editorial board of reputable and dedicated scholars within and outside of the discipline of marriage and family therapy. Their names and institutional affiliations appear in the masthead of each JMFT issue. We are indebted to them for their voluntary service to JMFT and the field. Each one of them has agreed to provide up to six peer reviews during the year. In 2021 I began reducing the workload that JMFT is putting on them and stopped requesting reviews from board members who had provided four reviews in a 12-month period. I would like to publicly thank each and every one of them for their efforts and service. JMFT's workflow would grind to a halt without the countless hours these volunteers dedicate to the peer review process. I continue to believe that the success of JMFT is directly connected to the experience authors have of us in the peer review process. If you are on our board, thank you for your professionalism. You are a major reason why JMFT continues to receive high-quality research papers.

This year we recognize Dr. Suzanne Bartle-Haring from The Ohio State University and Dr. Jared Durtschi from Kansas State University as our reviewers of the year. Both have served on the board for multiple years. Dr. Bartle-Haring has never declined an invitation to review for JMFT in my tenure as Editor. The tone of her reviews is respectful as she encourages researchers to present their work in the clearest possible manner. Dr. Durtschi's reviews are detailed, conversational, and supportive of the authors. Both of these professionals have helped many authors strengthen their manuscripts. We would also like to recognize as apprentice reviewers of the year, Dania Tawiq from Florida State University and Zachary Trevino from Texas Tech University. Both of these budding scholars provided respectful and detailed reviews for JMFT authors in 2022. These doctoral students represent our field's future research leaders. We also wish to express our appreciation for all the other apprentice reviewers and their mentors for their volunteer efforts with the Journal.

This annual report covers the period from January 1 to December 31, 2022. We present the total decisions on new manuscripts submitted in Table 1 and those resubmitted manuscripts in Table 2. There was a 6.9% acceptance rate on new submissions, this is fairly typical in the peer review arena where no papers are accepted outright for publication without some revisions. There was a 20.8% acceptance rate for manuscripts that received an initial editorial decision of “revise and resubmit.” For articles that had a decision made on them in this past year, the descriptors listed in Table 3 reflect the broad categories, and Table 4 reflects the more specific descriptors of the articles.

The most cited JMFT articles for the 2022 impact factor year (numbers reflect the citations of published manuscripts in the years 2020 and 2021) are listed in Table 5 (each one being cited a minimum of six times). As a reminder, only the last 2 years' worth of citations contribute to how the impact factor is calculated. JMFT currently has a 2-year impact factor of 2.2 and a 5-year impact factor of 2.3 (impact factors are only going out one decimal point now). This is a change from last year's impact factor of 2.58 for the 2-year impact factor and 2.71 for the 5-year impact factor. Our colleagues at Wiley explained to us that our impact factor would likely drop due to the number of COVID related-articles that were widely cited being now outside the impact factor window of 2 years. This number is also a bit of a “course correction” for previous impact factors that were affected by moving to a calculation that included manuscripts that appeared online in early view before they were bundled into an issue. A dramatic shift like this should not be noticed in the impact factor in the coming years. Our rank among family studies journals decreased from 18th out of 48 journals in 2021 to 22nd out of 46 journals in 2022. Among clinical psychology journals, our ranking increased from 86th out of 131 (titles) to 83rd out of 131 (titles) in those same years.

Table 6 includes the top ten most cited JMFT articles in 2022 from the Wiley online library. These data reflect any citations that were detected during the calendar year 2022 and comprise any articles from JMFT within and outside of the impact factor years. A quick scan of the years these articles were published reveals that many come from the January 2012 issue. This was one of the decade-in-review issues that specifically highlights outcome research in systemic family therapy. I anticipate that cited manuscripts from the January 2022 issue will, in coming years, begin to outpace those cited effectiveness/outcome articles from January 2012. Three of the other articles cited in this table reflect the special issue on delivering systemic family therapy via digital platforms.

Table 7 includes the top ten JMFT manuscripts that were viewed or downloaded during the 2022 calendar year. These articles are not necessarily being “cited” in other research but they are being viewed by readers. I believe that this use of JMFT content is making an impact on how people practice, teach, or learn systemic family therapy, but that it is the kind of “impact” i.e. more difficult to determine compared to a physical citation of a particular article. In past reports, the term “downloaded” was used to reflect this action; however, people are not necessarily “downloading” articles to print off as much as they are “viewing” them electronically (HTML versions mostly).

Table 8 lists the 20 most downloaded/viewed manuscripts in JMFT at the time this annual report was written. This is a new addition to the annual report and I think it is important to see what people are searching for when they turn to JMFT. Though it might be difficult to speak to any specific themes or trends, it is possible to infer that people are turning to JMFT to find research-based answers to clinical questions and situations. There is a strong indication that the 10 year reviews of outcome research are well represented in this list. Additionally, couple distress including divorce decision-making, dealing with romantic affairs, and the role of mindfulness are being viewed at high rates. It is also nice to know that manuscripts with direct application to social justice themes are being viewed by JMFT readers. In future annual reports, we will continue to include these most-viewed manuscripts to monitor trends in what our readership is seeking in our pages.

As this is my final annual report I want to make sure I extend my gratitude to the JMFT advisory council whose names appear in the masthead. They volunteer their time and work in the shadows and behind the scenes of the Journal when called upon. I count on them to provide quick opinions and have relied on their expertise and insights. I also want to thank Erin Guyette for her continued service as my editorial assistant. Erin's efficient and tireless work ethic makes my job much easier. I am grateful to be working with her. Before Erin, it was Aimee Hubbard who served as the editorial assistant. Both have rendered above and beyond service to JMFT. I'd also like to extend a special thanks to Dr. Katie Heiden-Rootes of St. Louis University for her work with the reviews section of the Journal. She makes sure there is always something in the queue ready to go out in the next edition. The three of us, Dr. Heiden-Rootes, Erin and I are all ending our current roles with JMFT effective December 31, 2023. We leave you all in the very capable hands of my friend and colleague, Dr. Lenore McWey of Florida State University. Over the past several months we've been working together to ensure a smooth transition of leadership at JMFT. Dr. McWey will be a wonderful Editor and comes to this position as a highly respected and well-regarded member of the MFT research community.

Finally, I would like to thank our colleagues and friends at Wiley for working so closely with us in the JMFT office but also with the leadership of AAMFT to support and sustain the publication and distribution of the Journal. As always, AAMFT supports and underwrites JMFT. Thank you to Kimberly Bryce, Dawn Berry, and AAMFT Executive Directors, Tracy Todd and Chris Michaels with whom I've worked over the years. I have felt their unflinching support in my role as Editor during my 6 years of service.