Welcome to the first Young Investigator Special Issue of the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine (JSSM). The JSSM family is proud to start this new service to the Sport Science community and to young researchers.
The background in starting this issue was the observation that large amounts of high-quality research is conducted every year by students and young investigators, but often remains solely in local university libraries and never reaches the scientific community or databases. In addition, most international journals have a high threshold in accepting papers, and it is often hard to reach this level for junior scientists because of lack of experience, supervision or confidence. These are major reasons that delay or in some cases stop young researchers from publishing their valuable work.
We all received help from senior colleagues in the beginning of our career. Now it is our turn to help youngsters. With this special issue, the JSSM is now serving young researchers as a channel for publishing their work. Our goal is to motivate young researchers to submit their work to JSSM, but we also aim to motivate supervisors and expert referees to be supportive and constructive towards these young scientists at the very beginning of their career.
The Young Investigator Special Issue followed a normal peer-review process, except that there were no straight rejections in the first phase of review. We advised the reviewers of the Young Investigator Special Issue to proceed with constructive advice and remarks for all manuscripts. This offered a great opportunity for the Young Investigators to revise the manuscript, while at the same time contributing to the learning process. Thereafter, if the revisions were properly conducted according to the remarks from reviewers, the manuscripts were accepted for publication.
We have received many manuscripts from young researchers with a lot of potential. There has been plenty of evidence of great talent, knowledge and capability in the new generation of scientists in the field of sports science. Furthermore, the high motivation seen in these contributors has convinced us that we were right in the direction that the JSSM has taken in this context.
We are very happy that we achieved our goal in a very short time. The JSSM Young Investigator Special Issue became ready one month before the planned schedule. Many expert referees wrote us and offered their help. Many other referees accepted our revision request immediately despite their busy schedule. The support of the supervisors was also substantial. At this point, we would like to thank all contributors to this first issue of the Young Investigator Special of the JSSM.
In the future, we hope that we can attract even more participants to share their knowledge with us, to write up their own work and to increase their motivation and confidence.
Finally, we hope that the readers will accept this Young Investigator Issue as a scientific source for research.
Enjoy it!
Mustafa Atalay, MD, MPH, PhD
Editor of YISI
Jukka A. Salmi, MSc, MPH
Guest Editor of YISI
Eric Eils, PhD
Guest Editor of YISI |
