A long-term aim of International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism (IJSNEM) is to advance our field by promoting scientific research that is appropriately designed, rigorously conducted, and properly reported. That was certainly the thinking behind recent initiatives, such as our new Author Toolbox that includes our PRESENT 2020 reporting guidelines (Betts et al., 2020; now also available in Spanish), our Time Series Response Analyzer (Narang et al., 2020), and our Manuscript Submission Template. A consistent focus of all these resources has been to encourage full and transparent reporting of science. Therefore, in recognition of the increasingly rich and complex data that can be generated by modern research, we have extended our maximum limits for original articles to 4,000 words with 10 tables and figures—and IJSNEM formally supports the sharing of source data, code, and other materials. To help facilitate public engagement and bring our authors’ work to a wider audience, we also now provide links to graphical abstracts and video explainers for papers on our journal website.
This brings me to our major new initiative for 2022, led by our special projects editor, Professor Louise Burke. IJSNEM has a strong track record of publishing highly cited consensus statements and methodology reviews to help researchers and practitioners alike improve their work. We will now formalize this activity by commissioning an ongoing series of articles in which leading experts review various measurement issues. Our plan is to release one such article in each upcoming issue of IJSNEM, starting with the next one.
I also wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a couple of emerging trends in submission patterns and areas of potential growth within our field. First, in terms of athlete health, low energy availability remains highly topical and is the focus of many papers we have received recently at IJSNEM. This is undoubtedly a valuable area of work and we continue to welcome these submissions. However, many studies in this area report the consequences of low energy availability without any objective verification of energy availability. This leaves a huge opportunity to advance understanding of this important topic using valid and reliable physiological markers of energy status, rather than relying on a few days of retrospective diet recall and training records.
Second, in terms of athlete performance, IJSNEM receives many submissions examining altogether novel nutritional supplements, often with quite speculative or even unknown mechanisms of action. While we must of course remain open to the possibility of as-yet undiscovered ingredients with potential performance effects, there can be no doubt that we still need to refine our understanding of the numerous existing supplements with already established effects. In particular, further advancement could be achieved by examining nutrient–nutrient interactions when combinations of supplements or ingredients are co-ingested—more submissions in this area would therefore be very welcome.
Finally, in the current issue, you will find our formal acknowledgement to all those who have kindly reviewed for IJSNEM over the past year. Looking back at the papers we have published over that period, it is encouraging to see such consistently high-quality research and for that I am thankful to our authors, reviewers, and editors. Please do continue to submit your best work to IJSNEM and to contribute towards our peer review processes whenever you are able.
References
Betts, J.A., Gonzalez, J.T., Burke, L.M., Close, G.L., Garthe, I., James, L.J., Jeukendrup, A.E., Morton, J.P., Nieman, D.C., Peeling, P., Phillips, S.M., Stellingwerff, T., van Loon, L.J.C., Williams, C., Woolf, K., Maughan, R., & Atkinson, G. (2020). PRESENT 2020: Text expanding on the checklist for proper reporting of evidence in sport and exercise nutrition trials. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 30(1), 2–13. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsnem.2019-0326
Narang, B.J., Atkinson, G., Gonzalez, J.T., & Betts, J.A. (2020). A tool to explore discrete-time data: The time series response analyser. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 30(5), 374–381. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsnem.2020-0150