Manuscript Arrivals Exceed
One per Day for BBMT

Only two or three manuscripts trickled in per month in the early days of Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation.  Now, during a typical workweek, they arrive at the rate of more than one a day. 

The dramatic growth in manuscript submissions can be tracked in the per-month arrivals since the journal's founding in 1995:

“When the journal was launched, ASBMT founders were cautioned that it would take years to establish a new medical journal and that the publishing landscape was littered with failed startups,” said Daniel Weisdorf, MD, chair of the ASBMT Publications Committee. 

“Clinicians and investigators always want to send their work to journals with an established reputation and readership," he said.   “We certainly demonstrated the truth of that.”

It took several years for the journal to be indexed by Index Medicus and MedLine, and several more to earn its first Impact Factor from the Institute for Scientific Information.  The Impact Factor for BBMT, a measure of the frequency of citations of its articles in the literature, has continued to climb to 3.561.  That places it fourth among 20 transplant journals, 16th among 60 hematology journals, and 28th among 114 immunology journals.

The journal moved from bi-monthly to a monthly publication schedule in 2000.

“Last year the manuscript rejection rate was 38%,” said Editor-in-Chief Robert Korngold, PhD.  “That rate has been fairly consistent over the past three years.  To accommodate the growing number of manuscripts, the size of the journal has continued to grow.”

The journal lost money and was heavily subsidized by the Society in its early years.  Since 2002, it has achieved a revenue surplus.