2025 in Review, 2026 in Preview

Happy new year. As usual, we'll look back to some of the successes of 2025 before highlighting some important initiatives for this new year. We had another very good year. Our submissions continue to rise, our publication metrics increased (Impact Factor [IF] went up slightly), and our process times decreased, all important goals of our Strategic Plan. As I write this in mid-December, we are just about at 3800 submitted manuscripts in 2025, a new record again this year. Although the rate of growth in submissions tapered a little these past few months, we're continuing to see more and more manuscripts. I plan to look at this in a future editorial. Despite this increase in submissions, we've managed to decrease our processing times. Turn-around times are less than 50 days, and overall processing times are less than 100 days. This is remarkable, thanks to the dedication of all editors. We've added new editors at all levels to assist, but some of us have managed to handle herculean numbers of manuscripts. Thanks to you all for carrying the load. Our journal metrics show our 2024 IF of 3.4 (2025 IF will come out by July), CiteScore of 6, and Journal Citation Indicator (JIC) of 0.68. In 2024, people viewed full-text articles in the journal 1,804,516 times. As of November 2025, that number is 1,874,409. Our 2-year citations trend is up as well, with over 8450 citations to articles in the 2-year IF window as of November, compared to 7230 in all of 2024. We were successful in publishing several Special Issues (SIs) or collections in 2025. This includes the SI on Ultra-Processed Food with Guest Editor Mario Estevez, and an SI entitled Health, Safety and Sustainability of Aquatic Foods with Denise Skonberg as Guest Editor, organized by IFT's Aquatic Foods Division. We also put together a Special Collection on Fat Reductions and Replacers in Foods. Use these links to find our SIs (https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/topic/vi-categories-17503841/special-issues/17503841) and special collections (https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/topic/vi-categories-17503841/special-collections/17503841) Another element of the Strategic Plan was to develop an Early Career Researcher program. In 2025, we were fortunate to engage Dr. John Coupland to lead that program for the IFT journals. He put together an Advisory Board and has selected the first cohort of Editorial Scholars for training. More on the future below. You may know that we underwent a search for a new publisher, accepting proposals from five different organizations, including Wiley. The proposals submitted were quite varied, with some mandating that JFS commit to a fully Open Access model, and most recommending that IFT consider growing our portfolio. After much discussion, the decision was made to remain with Wiley, but with a new contract more favorable to IFT. We anticipate another good year for 2026. Some important topics for this year include: As noted above, we successfully rolled out an ECR training program. With the first annual cohort of Editorial Scholars selected, we are now developing the training regimen to help them learn better how to conduct a peer review and learn about journal editing. The hope is that these mentees will be future editors of the IFT journals. Do you like ScholarOne? It's a really old and sometimes clunky tool for handling manuscripts, but it's the one we're used to—for the past 25 years. In the next few months, though, we'll be migrating to the Research Exchange (REX) system for handling manuscripts. We already use REX for submitting manuscripts, but now it will also be used for peer review and decision making. As with anything new, there will be a learning curve, hopefully not too steep, and the final result will be a better platform for editorial work. Stay tuned for updates. We currently have three SIs in the works. The first, entitled “Foodomics Technologies: Integrated Molecular Analysis for Food Safety, Quality, and Innovation,” will be co-edited by Guiomar Melgar and Denis Roy. A second one entitled “Artificial Intelligence in Food Science and Nutrition” will be co-edited by Muhamma Alu'datt and Akinbode Adedeji. Finally, Mario Estevez will be leading a SI on “Novel Proteins for Meat Replacement,” launching early in 2026. See our calls for special issue papers here: https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/17503841/call-for-papers Finally, in what ways will AI affect our roles as editors? REX already incorporates several applications. However, I include this point here because of the rapid rate of development and incorporation of AI in all aspects of our lives. I don't have a good crystal ball to see what developments will affect us most this year, but we can be guaranteed that it will continue to develop and assist scholarly publishing. These are new and exciting initiatives that means 2026 will be an interesting year. Thanks to all who contribute to the journal's success. Sincerely, Rich Hartel, PhD Editor in Chief, Journal of Food Science Professor, University of Wisconsin–Madison