It may seem astonishing now, but up until 1953, virtually nothing was known about the benefits of exercise to health. In that year, Professor Jerry Morris and his colleagues from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a paper in the Lancet entitled “Coronary Heart Disease and Physical Activity of Work”. They showed, for the first time, that people who were in active occupations (in this case bus conductors and postmen) suffered half as many fatal heart attacks as less active colleagues (bus drivers and postal clerks, respectively). As part of their verification process, they sat for days and watched bus conductors walk up and down the stairs of their double decker buses, covering as many as 750 steps per day! Morris was part of a vanguard in British science at the time, including Richard Doll (who published the link between smoking and lung cancer in 1950), and Francis Crick and James Watson who discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. The demonstration that being physically active is associated with a substantially lower risk of heart attacks, along with many other non-communicable diseases, was to be replicated numerous times in the intervening 70 years by other scientists such as Ralph Paffenbarger and Steve Blair. In tandem, the physiological, metabolic and genetic mechanisms of benefit were being unravelled in great detail so that today, we have a pretty good idea of how physical activity in all its forms helps us to stay fit and healthy … or as Jerry Morris so simply and elegantly put it, how it “normalises the workings of the body” (Simon Kuper, ”The man who invented exercise” Financial Times 12/09/2009).
However, although the fundamentals have been established over the past seven decades, there is clearly much more to do. The gap between knowledge and practice remains large, with huge swathes of the population classed as physically inactive. Obesity levels remain high and scandalously so in the young. The benefits of physical activity are largely by-passed by the disadvantaged sections of our society and the ever-expanding elderly population. Physical education and sport in the young are being squeezed by academic and other pressures from the tech revolution of the last 20 years. The medical profession is yet to fully embrace exercise as medicine, starting with the medical schools and their curricula. Ultimately, of course, the solution to many of these problems lies in the political sphere – after all, it is governments who decide to incentivize cycling, build pools, pedestrianize city centres, and increase physical education in schools. However, decision makers depend on the flow of high quality scientific information published in peer-reviewed journals, and we at the Journal of Sports Science must play our part.
The Journal, which was established 37 years ago, covers all the sports science domains and is one of the most trusted sources of emerging knowledge in the field. It has a current Impact Factor of 2.597 and is ranked 13th out of 85 Sports Science journals by citations. It receives nearly 3000 original submissions annually (up from 1500 in 2017) and averages around one million downloads each year. It has five journal sections including Physical Activity, Health and Exercise edited by Colin Boreham (University College, Dublin), Stuart Fairclough (Edge Hill University, UK), Isabel Ferreira de Sousa (University of Wollongong, Australia) and Jason Gill (University of Glasgow, UK), who bring diverse and complimentary expertise to the role. We encourage high quality submissions from across the spectrum of physical activity and health research, particularly those that can potentially make a difference to public health outcomes. We also seek to enhance the efficiency of the process from submission to publication, and to minimize the disappointment of rejection at the first hurdle. With this in mind, we offer the following tips to authors wishing to maximize their chances of getting to the point of external review and eventual publication.
If English is not your first language, please ensure that your paper has been proof read by a native English speaker before submitting
Follow the “Instructions for Authors”
First impressions count, so take particular care over the title and abstract.
Make sure the aims of your paper are clearly stated and based on a well-argued rationale, which should answer the question, “Why is this research being done?”
Is it clear that the research provides a sufficient increment in scientific knowledge within the field? Are referees (and readers) more likely to say to themselves, “Oh, that’s interesting”, or “There’s nothing new here”?
Is the methodology sound? Common errors include lack of a control group, lack of randomization in an RCT, no a priori statistical power calculations, and for population studies, insufficient information about the selection and representativeness of a population sample.
If your paper does make it through to review, please remember to answer your reviewer’s comments in a careful, thorough (point by point) and courteous manner. Reviewing is hard work, but can be hugely gratifying to both parties if the end product is demonstrably improved and ends up in print.
Speaking of our reviewers, this is an opportunity to thank each and every one of them who accept our requests to review a submission to JSS. It is an essential role within the academic ecosystem, but one which rarely gets acknowledged or appreciated away from the conference bar room.
Finally, we would like to encourage the readers of JSS to consider submitting their research on exercise and health to the section. The future for the field is bright, as the world is released from the grip of Covid with a renewed appreciation of the importance of exercise and fitness, and the global drive towards greener economies encourages alternative energy sources … including human muscle power.