Responding to global challenges and change: Working with our community to connect, develop and lead

This issue of International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (IJSLP) heralds the first collection of papers for 2021. While challenges arose in 2020 due to the pandemic that infiltrated all aspects of life, impacting, for example, the distribution of IJSLP to your door, and unplanned delays as reviewers redirected their energies to the home front, IJSLP continued to thrive, attracting and publishing a high quality array of articles that covered a broad range of contemporary clinical and theoretical issues. The release of the 2019 Impact Factors built on previous growth, with a substantial increase in Impact Factor to 1.733, ranking 34/187 in the Linguistics category. The journal’s 2019 CiteScore was 2.6, ranking 2/12 in the Research and Theory Scopus category. IJSLP has also moved from a Q2 journal to Q1, with a large increase in downloads. During 2020, article downloads increased by 25% compared to the previous year, already 30% higher than 2018, ensuring IJSLP is continuing to publish papers of high relevance and interest. Submissions have continued to rise each year, including international submissions.

Along with our regular papers, we saw two Special Issues in 2020, the first being the Special National Conference Issue from the joint 2019 Speech Pathology Australia and New Zealand Speech and Language Therapists’ Association Conference held in Brisbane, and edited by Laurelie Wishart and Clare McCann. This coming year will be the first year that we will not publish a Special Issue dedicated to the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference, owing to the events around the pandemic during 2020. We will, however, be preparing a Special Issue for the 2021 National Conference that is proceeding in a virtual/online format and will come out in 2022 as the third Issue. Guest Editors will be invited to oversee this Issue as part of our overall engagement with IJSLP readership. We ended the year on a Special Issue on Global Perspectives in Child Phonology, a collection of papers that emerged from the 2019 International Child Phonology Conference (ICPC), held in Montreal. Edited by Andrea MacLeod and Karen Pollock, supported by Barbara Dodd, this Issue presented a unique set of papers on phonological disorders from a global and cross-linguistic perspective.

The new Editorial model embraced by IJSLP in 2017 has continued with Anne Whitworth appointed Editor-In-Chief and Elizabeth Cardell joining the team as Co-Editor in January of last year. IJSLP farewelled Kirrie Ballard after six years in her leading Editorial role with the journal. A strong team of national and international Associate Editors continue to support the Editors in their specialist areas, including Joanne Arciuli, Deborah Hersh, Alison Holm, Deborah James, Robyn Lowe, Edwin Maas, Anna Miles, Julie Morris and Jennifer Oates. Editorial Consultants form a strong foundation for advice and specialist reviews, while the even larger group of professionals who review for IJSLP make the journal as strong as it is. Strategic plans are afoot in 2021 to set up a Community of Practice for our reviewers to develop, support and engage with this crucial arm of the publishing process and build Editors into the future. Suze Leitão continues to manage the twitter handle @IJSLP, with the team working closely with the Speech Pathology Australia Publications team to increase our social media presence.

IJSLP is also working to support authors, with updates to Author Guidelines and continuing to refer authors to the standards for conducting and reporting studies (http://www.equator-network.org). These standards set out the critical components to consider when designing and writing up research, ensuring a smooth transition when seeking to publish. There have been updates to protocols, as well as new protocols, since last discussing these in an Editorial (Whitworth & Ballard, 2017), such as the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) (Tricco et al., 2018). This site is a valuable friend for all researchers and clinicians wanting to implement and disseminate research.

IJSLP’s scope continues to cover a broad range of current clinical and theoretical issues that span experimental, review and theoretical discussion papers, and embrace studies from either quantitative and/or qualitative frameworks. Topics may relate to any area of child or adult communication or dysphagia, furthering knowledge on issues related to aetiology, assessment, diagnosis, intervention, or theoretical frameworks as well as contemporary professional insights and novel pedagogical practices that directly impact on clinical management.

Our first issue for 2021 reflects this scope, starting with two papers addressing professional issues, including the academic and professional experiences of male speech-language pathologists (Azios & Bellon-Harn, 2020) and ethical practice in global contexts (Staley et al., 2020). A range of papers explore issues with child populations, including sound discrimination and the mapping of sounds to meanings in pre-schoolers (Quam et al., 2020), a description of an Australian Aboriginal English dialect (Webb & Williams, 2020), and natural recovery from stuttering, also in a pre-schooler cohort, who did not receive intervention (Carey et al., 2020). Adult themes are then explored with two papers addressing services within an Australian context in adult palliative care (Chahda et al., 2020) and with people with Parkinson’s disease (Swales et al., 2020). An observational study using flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES) with neurological patients in intensive care (Braun et al., 2020) rounds off these papers. Two pedagogical papers complete the Issue with the first reporting the outcomes of a randomised controlled trial using simulation in clinical placements within the University setting (Hill et al., 2020), while a second explores SLP Managers’ perceptions of an eLearning program for clinicians in the workplace (Taubert, 2020).

As we move through this next decade, IJSLP Issues will continue to embrace this scope and promote the 2030 Speech Pathology Australia vision for equitable access, uncompromising care, client empowerment, and partnership models. While there is still much for us to understand in speech-language pathology, never before has there been so much focus on change, in part due to the continual advances brought about by the technology available to us, with “new normals” of how we work, educate, and conduct research emerging all the time. It is an exciting time for research in speech-language pathology and an exciting time for IJSLP.