State of the Journal, 2024

Last year marked the start of my second term as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Occupational Therapy (AJOT). I have always found it a privilege and an honor to serve the journal and this year has been no exception. In 2024, I have had the opportunity to represent our journal, and our profession, at national and international venues and to bring new knowledge back to the journal and our stakeholders. I’m excited to share with you in this editorial not only our key outcomes from 2024, but also our plans for the coming year as we anticipate major changes to rehabilitation research reporting worldwide.

This year, in Volume 78 of the journal, AJOT published a record number of 139 total articles (excluding supplements). This included 108 full-length research articles and 7 brief reports, totalling 115 research articles. In addition, we published 9 The Issue Is articles, 3 letters to the editor, 3 AOTA practice guidelines, 3 editorials, 2 State of the Science papers, 2 Evidence Connection papers, 1 Eleanor Clarke Slagle Lecture, and 1 presidential address.

Volume 78 (2024) included one special issue, one special section, and the return of State of the Science as an article type. In March of 2024, we published a special issue on Recovery of Function After Neurological Injury, which was guest edited by Amit Sethi, Jaclyn Stephens, Michelle Woodbury, and Sook-Lei Liew. Published in Volume 78, Issue 2 (March/April), this collection of articles highlighted the role occupational therapists can play in promoting functional recovery after acquired neurological injury. With a total of 24 research articles, this was one of AJOT’s largest special issues to date. The guest editorial for this special issue highlighted the breadth and depth of knowledge in the field of neurorehabilitation, as well as directions for future research.

We also published a special section on Play in Occupational Therapy in Volume 78, Issue 4 (July/August). Led by guest editors Heather Kuhaneck and Anita Bundy, this special section featured 15 articles from around the globe. The articles highlighted the role occupational therapy practitioners can play in promoting play and understanding the complex dynamics that support play across various settings, and examined topics such as play measurement and meaning across populations and contexts. This special section included a State of the Science paper on play that was developed by an international team of authors who provided a compelling overview of current play literature as well as areas in need of further research (Kuhaneck et al., 2024).

One additional State of the Science paper was published in Volume 78, Issue 1 (January/February 2024), entitled “Establishing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Priorities for Occupational Therapy Research.” This paper, authored by Khalilah R. Johnson, Selena E. Washington, Catherine R. Hoyt, Tyra M. Banks, Rosa Román-Oyola, and Razan Hamed (Johnson et al., 2024), examines current evidence that aligns common applications of diversity, equity, and inclusion in occupational therapy research and suggests areas of focus for advancing a culturally affirming and antiracist science of occupation.

We are in the process of preparing a new AJOT special issue for Volume 79 (2025) entitled “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Accessibility (DEIJA) in Occupational Therapy Practice and Education,” which is a special topic that grew out of the 2024 State of the Science paper. The special issue will be guest edited by Khalilah R. Johnson, Selena E. Washington, Tyra M. Banks, and Razan Hamed and will be published in Volume 79, Issue 2 (March/April 2025).

In 2024, we continued the AJOT Authors & Issues interview series, which can be accessed through our YouTube channel as well as through the AJOT website. Since the series launched in December 2021, we have published more than 30 interviews with AJOT authors, tallying more than 11,000 views. Topics covered in the 2024 Authors & Issues sessions are listed in Table 1. The most-watched episodes in 2024 have been related to mental health and play in occupational therapy. Articles featured in the series are Open Access, making translation into practice even more accessible.

AJOT content is also available through our Instagram account (ajoteditor), which continues to feature two monthly research briefs, editor spotlights, viewer polls, recaps of our Authors & Issues series, and opportunities to direct message the Editor-in-Chief. Since its launch in August 2022, the AJOT Instagram account has accumulated more than 1,000 followers.

The AJOT website continues to make finding relevant information faster and easier for users, including access to full-text articles, clinical practice guidelines, resources for potential reviewers and authors, and AOTA INSPIRE conference abstracts. The website also hosts special article collections on topics such as DEI, functional cognition, and cancer, which are regularly updated.

Our journal and its editorial staff were also recognized this year at national and international venues. Dr. Khalilah Johnson (AJOT Associate Editor) was added to the AOTA Roster of Fellows at the 2024 INSPIRE Conference & Expo in Orlando, Florida, joining several other AJOT board members who also hold this honor, including Yael Goverover (AJOT Associate Editor), who was recognized in 2023. Dr. Goverover also received designation as a Fellow of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM) in 2024. Dr. Johnson and I (AJOT Editor-in-Chief) also presented on bias-free research reporting at AOTA INSPIRE 2024. As Editor-in-Chief of AJOT, I was invited to participate in a research summit on the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) in Philadelphia, and be a part of an international panel of journal editors reviewing and revising the Cochrane Rehabilitation Reporting Guidelines. These are just a few examples of how AJOT is engaging in, and leading, efforts to promote excellence in research dissemination.

Each year, since 2021, AJOT has acknowledged those scholars who have made a significant contribution to the journal and, secondarily, to the profession of occupational therapy. The AJOT Outstanding Reviewer Award is given to reviewers annually based upon the number of reviews completed, the quality of the reviews, and the timeliness of their reviews during the calendar year. The recipients are nominated by AJOT’s editorial board members and the Editor-in-Chief. Nineteen individuals received the award for 2024. The AJOT Certificate of Appreciation is given to AJOT official reviewers who completed at least four reviews during the calendar year, all of which were submitted within 30 days of acceptance of the review. For 2024, 18 certificates were awarded. Finally, the AJOT Impact Award was presented for the first time in the journal’s history to Dr. Christine Berg. This award acknowledges scholars who have reached the milestone of completing more than 50 article reviews for the journal. A list of all awardees can be found in Table 2.

A journal impact factor (JIF) is a frequency measure that reflects the number of times, on average, articles have been cited in a specific time period. The 2-yr and 5-yr JIF scores are the most frequently reported and are used to rank journals in terms of significance. The calculation is determined by dividing the number of times articles were cited in the given period (i.e., 2 yr or 5 yr) by the number of articles published in the journal. In addition to the research articles, AJOT’s JIF scores include AOTA Practice Guidelines and AOTA official documents. Editorials and opinion-based articles (e.g., AJOT’s The Issue Is column) are not included in this calculation. AJOT’s 2-yr impact factor decreased unexpectedly from 2.9 in 2022 to 2.1 in 2023 (Journal Citation Reports [JCR], 2024). It is worth noting that the 2-yr impact factor reflects papers published in 2021 and 2022, years directly following the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Several other journals that publish occupational and physical therapy research also saw a decrease in their 2-yr impact factor during this same span of time, suggesting that this could be a reasonable explanation.

On a more positive note, the journal’s 5-yr impact factor, reflecting publications from 2018 to 2022, increased from 3.1 to 3.2 (see Table 3). The top 10 most-cited articles contributing to AJOT’s 2-yr impact factor are listed in Table 4. Of these 10 articles, 3 were review articles.

JCR ranks journals in various categories on the basis of their JIF as well as other factors, such as citation and article counts, publisher information, and subject categories. Based on JIF, AJOT ranked 40/169 in the category of Rehabilitation. This is in comparison to a rank of 60/169 in 2022. So despite our 2-yr impact factor decreasing, our status within rehabilitation journals continues to increase. Within the rehabilitation category, AJOT continues to be first among all occupational therapy journals worldwide.

CiteScore is another journal evaluation metric based on citations recorded in the Scopus database. CiteScore 2023 is the number of citations in 2020–2023 for articles published in 2020–2023, divided by the number of articles published in 2020–2023 (Scopus, 2023). In 2024, AJOT’s CiteScore increased from 2.8 to 3.1, placing the journal in the 85th percentile of occupational journals.

Between January 1, 2024, and September 1, 2024, AJOT had 477 total submissions (327 original, 150 revised), putting us on track to exceed the 551 total submissions in 2023 (361 original, 190 revised). Our acceptance rate in 2024 was 25.8%. Overall, acceptance rates for the journal have remained stable over the past 5 yr, ranging from 24% to 30% (Table 5). AJOT received submissions in 2024 from all over the world, matching our journal-high record in 2023 of 31 different countries. Outside of the United States, Australia (n = 6), Israel (n = 4), Taiwan (n = 3), and Turkey (n = 3) had the highest number of accepted articles for 2024. Other countries with articles accepted for publication in AJOT in 2024 include Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Spain. Acceptance rates were higher for U.S. authors (32.9%) than for international authors (19.4%).

Volume 78 included six regular issues and two supplements. In the regular issues, 115 research articles and 24 nonresearch articles (e.g., editorials, The Issue Is columns, and clinical practice guidelines) were published. A full breakdown of the types of articles published in 2024, including the evidence levels for these articles, is presented in Table 6. Of the 115 research articles published, 30.4% were classified as basic articles focused on establishing descriptive relationships between conditions and occupational limitations, prevalence or incidence of conditions or client factors, predictors of outcomes, or taxonomies. This represented a marked increase from previous years, where basic or descriptive articles represented only about 16%–18% of total research submissions. In contrast, we saw a decrease in the total number of effectiveness studies published from 2023 (n = 26, 24.3% of total publications) to 2024 (n = 16, 13.9% of total submissions).

Funding sources reported for AJOT-published articles reached an all-time high with 51 sources identified in Volume 78 (2024). International funding sources led the way, accounting for 35.3% of total funding sources reported, followed by the National Institutes of Health (19.6%) and university-based funding (15.7%). A full listing of funding sources is presented in Table 7.

The masked peer-review process is at the core of the journal’s ability to critique the rigor and trustworthiness of submitted articles. All submissions are screened for appropriateness by the Editor-in-Chief and then distributed to an associate editor for screening, soliciting reviewers, and working with the authors and reviewers throughout the peer-review process. A minimum of two peer reviewers are solicited to evaluate the rigor and acceptability of an article for publication in AJOT. From January 1, 2024, through September 1, 2024, our team solicited 703 reviewers, 357 of whom accepted our review request (50.8% acceptance rate). This year, authors submitting their articles to AJOT waited an average of 24.8 days until the first decision was made on their article. Time from submission to final decision varied based on article type and number of revisions required. Not unexpectedly, letters to the editor, brief reports, and editorials received decisions more rapidly than research articles or The Issue Is columns. On average, papers received a final decision within 30.1 days, with research articles receiving a final decision in 32.4 days. Note that these figures do not include the time the manuscript was being revised by the authors (see Table 8 for details).

The field of rehabilitation research will likely see major changes in the next few years with the much-anticipated publication of the Guideline for Intervention Description in Rehabilitation (GUIDE-Rehab). GUIDE-Rehab is a product of Cochrane Rehabilitation and based on the need to bolster rehabilitation within health systems worldwide (World Health Assembly, 2023). As noted by the team at Cochrane Rehabilitation, rehabilitation treatments are multifaceted, often integrating biomedical and behavioral intervention research elements; however, the quality of intervention reporting in clinical trials within rehabilitation often falls short (Cochrane Rehabilitation, 2024). The new guidelines will aim to provide a comprehensive framework for describing interventions in rehabilitation studies, with much of the structure and terminology evolving from the RTSS (Hart et al., 2018, 2019).

As noted in my editorial entitled “Improving Standards of Research Reporting in Intervention Research: Considerations for the Rehabilitation Treatment Specific System Model” (Reynolds, 2023), the RTSS provides a universal system for describing, or specifying, rehabilitation interventions using a theory-based framework (Zanca et al., 2019). Yet the RTSS, and subsequently the GUIDE-Rehab, use a language that will be novel to many editorial boards, researchers, and clinicians and will involve a learning curve to implement in practice. In preparation for the upcoming changes, I (in my role as Editor-in-Chief of AJOT) have participated in invited workshops and panels with leaders in RTSS scholarship as well as with Cochrane Rehabilitation. As such, I believe AJOT will be well prepared for this shift in our science and will be the occupational therapy journal leading our profession with these much-needed improvements in research reporting.

This major initiative supports AJOT’s overarching goal of helping to translate occupational therapy research into practice. In addition to preparing for new reporting guidelines, our editorial board has outlined the following specific goals for the 2025 volume year:

• ▪ Update AJOT Author Guidelines and include new policies on papers detailing assessment development and psychometric testing.

• ▪ Hire new associate editors to replace those who have rotated off the board.

• ▪ Publish a special issue on DEIJA.

• ▪ Solicit articles for our new special issue (2026) on occupational therapy’s role with veterans.

• ▪ Promote engagement with the journal through the AJOT Instagram account.

• ▪ Host monthly AJOT Authors & Issues discussions.

AJOT continues to grow as a journal, serving as a leading resource for occupational therapy practitioners around the world. Our accomplishments would not be possible without the dedication of our editorial team, our reviewers, and AOTA, all of whom continually support the journal and our mission to publish peer-reviewed content that is rigorous and up to date and that includes current best practice standards.