The Urologist was edited and funded inside AURO.it, the Italian association of urologists. The journal did not publish a separate masthead page while it was online, so the editorial structure has to be read from the issues themselves — and the issues name the people who carried editorial responsibility.
Editorial comments signed by the editorial team
Volume 2, number 1 (2014) was a special issue on survival and quality of life after radical cystectomy. Every systematic review in it was published together with a signed editorial comment, which is how the journal exposed its editorial judgement to the reader:
- Rodolfo Hurle — editorial comment on “Health related quality of life in women with orthotopic urinary diversion. A systematic review and critical analysis of literature.”
- Angelo Naselli — editorial comment on “Radical cystectomy in octogenarians”.
- Fulvio Di Tonno — editorial comment on “Urinary Diversion: patients’ acceptance and quality of life”.
- Giuliana Leucci — editorial comment on “Urodynamic and continence evaluation of continent urinary diversion”.
The same special issue was coordinated by Professor James N'Dow of the University of Aberdeen, as stated in the issue description published with the cover.
How decisions were taken
The peer review process describes the division of labour: editors screened every manuscript for originality and technical soundness before formal review, two or more external reviewers assessed what survived the screen, and one member of the editorial team was assigned to each manuscript and took the final decision on the basis of the reviews. Reviewers and authors never saw each other's names — the journal ran a double-blind process. Authors received the decision within seven days of submission, and proofs had to come back within three days.
Reviewers
Reviewer names were not published, which is consistent with a double-blind model. The reviewer pool was drawn from the association's membership and from the international groups that published in the journal: Italian departments in Naples, Milan, Rome, Genoa, Alba, Parma and Catania, and co-authors from Mansoura and Alexandria University in Egypt and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.
Who published here
The author index holds 177 entries across eight issues. The affiliations recorded with those entries show the journal's centre of gravity: A.O.R.N. Antonio Cardarelli in Naples, Istituto Clinico Humanitas in Rozzano, San Camillo-Forlanini in Rome, the National Institute for Cancer Research in Genoa, San Lazzaro Hospital in Alba, Ospedale Cannizzaro in Catania and the Urology and Nephrology Center of Mansoura University.
The full list is kept on the author index, and every paper is listed with its authors on the title index.
Contacting the editors
Editorial questions now go through the association's secretariat; the address is on the contact page. Requests that concern a single paper are usually answered faster by the corresponding author, whose affiliation is recorded in the author index.