really brief, and I'll just tell you a quick story before I start. Who was at the reviewer workshop? That was an awesome reviewer workshop about machine learning, a little bit of artificial intelligence. Let me tell you a story. About 10 years ago, I was getting an MBA at MIT. That's when I first learned about this. And they asked us, they asked the second year MBA students to look at all the financial records from major companies, all the debt to equity ratios, everything we could possibly find on that company, and then how that would have performed starting in 1950, moving forward. And so that's what they did at MIT. And with machine learning, they came up with this algorithm of what makes stocks, some stocks really successful, and what market conditions make some stocks really successful, and what don't make things really successful. And that was my first intro to machine learning. A lot of companies now have this proprietary sauce, so to speak, so that if you, it's not just one stock, but they can take a whole portfolio, bring it back to 1950, start the market conditions with a model and see how that would have performed. And then they can look at it going forward and say, how would this portfolio have performed going forward? So if you go home and say, honey, I think maybe we should buy JetBlue stock. I gotta tell you, there are a bunch of pros who are probably betting against you. So that's my experience with machine learning. So onto current concepts. I've been doing this since 1992. I started with Dr. Leach. And if we got 10 current concepts articles a year, I was ecstatic. I think Donna will tell us we probably published two the first year. This year, our run rate is almost 400 current concepts articles. So when you look at the trend line for this, that's not a linear trend line. It's actually an exponential trend line in the number of current concepts. It really started back in the era of the pandemic, but it's really continued. So on track for 400 current concepts. So that's 40, almost 40 a month that we're seeing, which is great. That's awesome. But with that, the number of rejections also went up and you can see that the number of rejections has also come down. And the reason why the number of rejections has come down is because we've increased the number of current concepts that we're publishing. So we have to, we're accepting more current concepts to fill that. I'll show you more about the rejections in just a moment also. These are the rapid rejections. A rapid rejection was when somebody writes in and they submit a meta-analysis or they submit a systematic review or another type of current concept, perhaps it's a narrative current concepts. And I look at this and I say, I'm not gonna burden the reviewers with this. I'm not gonna send this out because this is not gonna make it under any circumstances. It's probably not gonna make it. And that's what a rapid rejection is. So the rapid rejections have also increased as well. Once again, we're now publishing four articles as of this past year, four articles per, four articles in every journal. So that's why that's gone down. The days to publication in online publication, about 165 days to online publication. So that's about half a year, five months or so to online publication. And that's okay, that's also started to come down a little bit, it reached a peak last year. And I'm okay with four to five months. I'm not okay with this. This is days to print publication. And this is where I'm starting to struggle, 563 days to print publication. So when you think about a current concept, it's not that current anymore, right? If it's 563 days before it hits print publication. So this is something that I need to work on to get things into print sooner than what we're seeing here. Online publication is great, but a lot of people still wanna have the journal in their hand, in their suitcase. Here's the raw acceptance rate. This is what Bruce was just talking about. This is my raw acceptance rate for current concepts. I'd like to keep this somewhere between 12 and 18%. And it pretty much is around that level here. Once again, the more articles we get, the more we reject, the more articles we publish, the less we reject. Moving on, the systematic review award this year is truly from all over the world. Some of the authors of this article are from Australia, from Melbourne, Australia, and some are from Canada as well. And it's anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction with or without lateral extra-articular reconstruction. Level one study. So the trends in current concepts have been orthobiologics, statistical fragility, hip arthroscopy, ACL, l'interjet versus remplissage, or both, the definition of failure, the definition of failure of a meniscus repair. Sounds intuitive, but it's not. And return to sport as well. We're starting to see statistical fragility fade a little bit, as well as hip arthroscopy starting to fade a little bit as well. So my own report card, I try and clean out my cues. As an editor, we have cues in Benchpress. I try and clean them out every single week so that they're zeroed out, and most of the time I'm able to do that. I don't want to be the bottleneck and be the 563-day delay so I move as quickly as I possibly can. I'm not that good at communicating with authors, and that's what I need to improve. The quality of articles. We have level one articles being accepted, but we also have level four articles being accepted as well. I think the level four ones actually supply really good information. I'd like to see them more level one, though. Once again, communication with reviewers has not been that great. Sometimes I'll get a terrific review, and shame on me for not sending a note to the reviewer saying, hey, that was just an awesome, awesome review. Impact factor has been solid throughout. DEI has also been solid. We're accepting articles from literally all over the world, which is wonderful. Time to publication. I'm failing on that one. This is a solid, one of my kids brought this home. It's a solid 2.5. It's okay, Dad. It's a B minus. So now we're gonna have some fun. So this is interactive. You can be the current concepts editor. These are five articles that I've received in one month, and you're gonna make the call with me whether to send this out for review. First of all, is it sports medicine, and should it go out for review, or should it be rapid rejected? I won't tell you what I did until the end. Sports medicine, does it belong in AJSM, rapid reject? And this is the end of my talk, so here we go. The prevalence of systematic sclerosis related to acro-osteolysis, systematic review. Does anybody know what this is? This is actually a combination of scleroderma and Raynaud's phenomena together. So I'll let you think about this. Does this go to the reviewers? Does this not go to the reviewers? Yeah, this one did not. This was one of the rapid rejects that we saw. Okay, here's number two. Mental health in elite athletes, systematic review on suicidal ideation, attempt, and completion. Thoughts about that? Yeah, this one, I think this is really important, actually. This did go out to the reviewers. And what's interesting from the article is that athletes actually have less suicidal ideation, less completion, as you would perhaps think. Shoulder range of motion in competitive tennis players, a systematic review. And what they found is essentially what we know about baseball players, right? Overhand throwing athletes. Out for review? Well, it's a sports medicine. Yeah, everybody's shaking their head, yeah. Should it go out to review to the reviewers? Is there gonna be a wide interest in this at the journal? I felt that they put the time into this, and I did send this out for review. I'm not gonna tell you how these ended up, but this one did go out for review. But you could predict what the article is gonna tell you about a tennis player and their hand dominance. Clinical investigation on the timing of elective arthroscopic surgery for patients with perioperative COVID-19 infection. This one actually came from China. And it essentially said when the patient's feeling better, they can have surgery. And with a 563 delay in print publication, I thought that the readership was not gonna benefit a lot from this, publishing this in 1925, I'm sorry, 2025. Sorry, that's how old I am. In 2025, so this one did not go out for review. I did not think this added valuable information to the readership. Interesting article. There wasn't anything new in this. And then the last one, this is a harder one. A descriptive epidemiological study of contact sports participation of children and young athletes with a solitary kidney. So this is a narrative review. This is not a systematic review, but there's very, very little written about this subject. And so this is part of my quandary too, because we have focused on systematic reviews and meta-analysis, and we're trying to get to level one studies. But to me, this is pretty important also. So to me, this is definitely sports medicine. There's not a lot of information out there. We're tested on this by the ABOS as well. And this one actually did go out for review as well. So with that, I'd like to thank the editorial board and the reviewers. They make AJSM the best article, certainly from my standpoint, the best article in sports medicine and orthopedic surgery, the best journal in the world. And I'm gonna start to give an MVP award. And this year, the MVP award is going to go to the editor of OJ, one of the editors of OJSM. This is a guy who I think is using artificial intelligence because I cascade an article to him. Within 24 hours, he sends back a full review. And I swear it is the most incredible review. He's the best reviewer I've ever seen. And that's Dan Washer. So he gets the MVP award. And AJSM and OJSM have a really strong relationship. And that relationship is really built on Dan because he does such a remarkable job at this. So with that, I'll stop. I'd like to thank everybody very much. That's Current Concepts. What do people think about narrative, I don't want to start publishing, you know, in the old days of current concepts, you know, I would write, I've got to tell you this, I would write, you know, God bless us all, Champ Baker, I'd write Champ Baker a letter, can you write an article about LOR proscopy? And maybe three months later I'd get a letter back. This was before the advent of the internet, believe it or not. I'd get a letter back three months later, yes, I'm happy to write an article, then it would appear. Level five evidence, some people got benefit from that. But what do people think about narrative reviews instead of systematic reviews, expert opinion on some subjects? It depends on how well done it is and whether after you read it you really feel like you were educated. And if it is a topic where there's not a lot of stronger evidence but you still feel it's useful to the readership and the quality of the work is good, then I think there's value in it. I like that, I think that's great. Yeah, I mean a lot of the meta-analysis tells us that we don't have enough good data to make it, you know, just because it says meta-analysis and systematic review doesn't necessarily make it a great paper or a great study. Right. And there are certainly some topics that are hot topics, important topics, topics that don't have a lot of research to it that do benefit team physicians and do benefit our readership that I think those narratives, especially if they're not overstating what they can say from what data exists, I think it has a lot of value. Anybody opposed to it? Anybody opposed to seeing an occasional? Oh, that's very helpful. Yes, I have a question. You gave great data on time from acceptance to publication and to, you know, online and print publication. What's the average timeline from submission to the first, you didn't mean the first go-round? It could be that- Gosh darn you, I was on the airplane and I thought to myself, I completely forgot that. I think Donna and I can tell you it is probably around eight weeks, six to eight weeks. It's actually pretty quick. I mean to me that's pretty quick. From the time it's accepted to the time the author actually hears what the verdict is, whether there's going to be a revision or a rejection or acceptance. It's about eight weeks. Very, very few go past ten weeks. You caught me. Yes. It's really hard, your point is absolutely correct. If you have a systematic review of level one studies, that's better than one level one study. That's at the top of the pyramid, of the Oxford pyramid. But you're absolutely right, we don't have enough level one studies about most things. But as they come along, as they come down the road, as we recognize that, that's what I'm hoping we're gonna publish more of. Your arthroscopy journal has come out and said, I don't want to get into this too much, but it's about the arthroscopy journals that we really just want to publish level one studies. So I think we'll publish two a year, three a year. Yes. So Keith and I were just commenting, the study on the COVID, how does that end up in the current concepts, if what's that's generally been is kind of either review and or systematic review, how does that end up in your purview in your section of the journal? But you're concerned with it. The systematic reviews typically come to current concepts. And that was a systematic review. Oh, okay. That was a systematic review, once again, out of China, but they looked at articles relating to COVID. Okay, that's sort of an interesting question. Is COVID-19 in the rearview mirror now? I'm still getting a trickle of articles about COVID-19 effect on this and that. What's the level of interest in that? Just to spontaneously introduce this into the agenda. Are we very interested in this? Is this something we should continue to review or should we be rapid rejecting these articles? Opinions? Pedro. I think people can be a little bit tired at this point. How the subject would not attract much interest. Other opinions? Bruce, I think it's dependent on the topic and what the message is. If it's workforce or supply chain because of COVID, I think that's something important today. So, if it has COVID in the title, that should automatically be rapidly rejected. I think we're seeing a different, we may not be seeing the disease and the effects of the, the direct human effects of the disease. We're certainly seeing other aspects of the pandemic. I think it has to be filtered out through the editor, I guess, in my opinion. How about studies that measure the decrease in procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic and then increase afterwards? Things like that. Are we still interested in those? Who's interested? Raise your hand. Not a lot. Okay. Well, we'll continue to consider them on a case by case basis, which is what we're doing. But I guess I'm expressing my own fatigue now with COVID-19. Maybe I just want to forget about it. A big hole in my life that lasted almost two years.

machine learning

stock prediction

current concepts articles

publication time

editor performance