Editorial

This issue of Ergonomics marks the end of the journal's 50^th year of scholarly publication. Over this period, Ergonomics has made a substantial contribution to the discipline, supporting the research base, whilst striving to maintain high scientific standards with its contents. As its official journal, Ergonomics has also played an important part in the history of the Ergonomics Society (Waterson and Sell 2006).

Another landmark this year has been the move of Ergonomics to the online submission and peer review system Manuscript Central™. This transition has proceeded well and manuscripts are now flowing smoothly through the ether. A significant advantage of Manuscript Central is that it supports an early interaction with potential reviewers, allowing confirmation of whether they are prepared to assess a paper prior to it being sent to them. As it is straightforward for reviewers to decline at this stage, the result is that when a request to review is accepted, reviewers are much more likely to provide their report in a timely manner. It is partly as a benefit of this that authors are in most cases now receiving an initial decision on their manuscripts within 3 months, a considerable improvement on previous timescales.

Another aspect of the electronic age of publishing is rapid growth in the use of online editions of journals, Ergonomics being no exception. A benefit of this for publishers and editors is ready access to data on usage, such as the frequency with which individual papers have been accessed. The most frequently downloaded papers from Ergonomics for 2005–06 are shown in table 1, providing an indication of the subject areas of contemporary interest to the readership of the journal.

Table 1. Most frequently downloaded papers from Ergonomics 2005–06, during Jan–Oct 2007, listed in descending frequency of access.

Authors	Title
Küller et al. (2006)	The impact of light and colour on psychological mood: a cross-cultural study of indoor work environments.
Edworthy and Waring (2006)	The effects of music tempo and loudness level on treadmill exercise.
Corlett (2006)	Background to sitting at work: research-based requirements for the design of work seats.
Dennerlein and Johnson (2006a)	Different computer tasks affect the exposure of the upper extremity to biomechanical risk factors.
Dennerlein and Johnson (2006b)	Changes in upper extremity biomechanics across different mouse positions in a computer workstation.
Vanezis and Lees (2005)	A biomechanical analysis of good and poor performers of the vertical jump.
Morris and Leung (2006)	Pilot mental workload: how well do pilots really perform?
Fogarty and Mckeon (2006)	Patient safety during medication administration: The influence of organizational and individual variables on unsafe work practices and medication errors.
Pline et al. (2006)	Influence of fatigue time and level on increases in postural sway.
Knowles et al. (2005)	Towards the reflective sports coach: issues of context, education and application.
Burnfield and Powers (2006)	Prediction of slips: an evaluation of utilized coefficient of friction and available slip resistance.
Rouch et al. (2005)	Shiftwork experience, age and cognitive performance.
Karwowski (2005)	Ergonomics and human factors: the paradigms for science, engineering, design, technology and management of human-compatible systems.
Elfering et al. (2006)	Work stress and patient safety: Observer-rated work stressors as predictors of characteristics of safety-related events reported by young nurses.
Rahnama et al. (2005)	A comparison of muscle strength and flexibility between the preferred and non-preferred leg in English soccer players.
Attwells et al. (2006)	Influence of carrying heavy loads on soldiers' posture, movements and gait.
Hendriks et al. (2006)	Stability of sitting postures: the influence of degrees of freedom.
Stanton et al. (2006)	Distributed situation awareness in dynamic systems: theoretical development and application of an ergonomics methodology.
Bos et al. (2006)	The effects of occupational interventions on reduction of musculoskeletal symptoms in the nursing profession.
Hignett and Masud (2006)	A review of environmental hazards associated with in-patient falls.

Looking at these papers, the contributions by Dennerlein and Johnson (2006a, 2006b) are concerned with the musculoskeletal implications of computer use, familiar territory for Ergonomics. The same is true of the papers on sitting and seating by Corlett (2006) and Hendriks et al. (2006). Burnfield and Powers (2006), Hignett and Masud (2006) and Pline et al. (2006) address the problem of falls, a topic on which Ergonomics has published a good number of papers since its first special issue on Slipping, Tripping and Falling in 1983 (volume 26, issue 1). It is interesting that another issue in 1983 (volume 26, issue 8) dealt with Medical Ergonomics, an early precursor to the double special issue on Patient Safety published in 2006, featuring the papers of Elfering et al. (2006), Fogarty and Mckeon (2006) and Hignett and Masud (2006). Patient safety research is a burgeoning area of ergonomics at present and papers on this topic seem likely to continue to have a presence in ergonomics journals for some time to come. Ergonomics has also had a tradition of special issues on sports ergonomics and the articles by Knowles et al. (2005), Rahnama et al. (2005) and Vanezis and Lees (2005) featured in the multiple part special issue on Sports, Leisure and Ergonomics published that year.

Regarding the circumstances of other papers in table 1, Karwowski (2005) was an invited Plenary paper at the XV^th Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association, Korea 2003, while Rouch et al. (2005) was the 2007 recipient of the Liberty Mutual Award, established to promote excellence in safety and health research. The paper by Stanton et al. (2006) was a significant theoretical paper in the special issue of Ergonomics on Command and Control. The articles by Küller et al. (2006) and Edworthy and Waring (2006) stand out in particular for the frequency with which they have been accessed, perhaps because of a wide general interest in the topics of these papers.

The count of the number of times a paper has been downloaded may be no more than an indicator of readers' anticipated interest in a paper, as stimulated by the paper title and abstract. Accessing a paper in this way does not necessarily mean that the content will be used or drawn upon. Another measure of the impact of a publication is the number of times it is cited subsequently. Table 2 lists the 5 most frequently cited papers from the previous two volumes of Ergonomics, each of these having been cited 8–9 times by other papers at the time of writing (publishing lead times mean that there can be a delay between a paper being published and influence becoming visible within other published research). The appearance in this list of the papers by Stanton and Young (2005) and Walker et al. (2006) perhaps reflects the continuing attention by this journal to vehicle and driving ergonomics and the special issue on Driver Safety published in 2007. Bao and Silverstein's (2005) paper on estimation of hand force in job evaluations contributes to the understanding of the validity and reliability of the force matching approach to estimation of hand forces exerted in the workplace, an important methodological issue for assessing the risk of upper extremity exposures. Hodges et al.'s (2005) paper was another contribution to the 2005 special issue on Sports, Leisure and Ergonomics.

Table 2. Most frequently cited papers from Ergonomics 2005–06, as of Oct 2007.

Authors	Title
Walker et al. (2006)	The ironies of vehicle feedback in car design.
Stanton and Young (2005)	Driver behaviour with adaptive cruise control.
Bao and Silverstein (2005)	Estimation of hand force in ergonomic job evaluations.
Takeyama et al. (2005)	Effects of shift schedules on fatigue and physiological functions among firefighters during night duty.
Hodges et al. (2005)	Changes in coordination, control and outcome as a result of extended practice on a novel motor skill.

As we move forward to the next 50 years of Ergonomics, the aim of the present Editors, working with the Editorial Board and the journal's reviewers, will continue to be to attract and publish high quality, high interest research from across the discipline. The journal will also persist with efforts to improve its service to authors and readers. A high priority is to achieve and maintain swift review times for papers, leading to more rapid publication of research, ensuring the content of Ergonomics is as contemporary as possible.