The Future of German Journal of Sports Medicine: Digitalization, Innovation, and International Visibility

Many people were probably surprised that they did not receive their Journal of Sports Medicine as usual by mail. After more than a year of preparation, we converted the Journal to an electronic format starting 1st January 2025.

As a member of a league of sports physicians within the DGSP, we have had you in our thoughts and decisions from the start in order to guarantee the best possible service. In addition to financial cost reduction measures – the production costs for the Journal increased immensely in the past few years due to considerable price increases for printing and particularly for paper – as well as obvious ecological reasons coupled with our efforts toward currency and modernity moved us to this change in format.
However, all fans of classical reading get their money’s worth with the printed version of the DZSM: All regular subscribers will still receive the DZSM by mail and any member of a sports physician league of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sportmedizin und Prävention e.V. (DGSP) can still receive the printed version of the DZSM on request for a small printing and mailing surcharge.
We, at the publishers, as well as in the Editorial Office and in the Verein zur Förderung der Sportmedizin e.V. (VFSM) are particularly pleased to guide you through the development history of the new personal membership area and the newly-founded publishing house. We look forward to your honest feedback and any suggestions for improvement!

One totally clear advantage of this altered format is that we can inform you much more quickly of current developments in the discipline. This concerns both the publication of scientific articles at university institutions and information on new trends found in international literature.
For you as a user, this means a few new possibilities for use, but possibly also a totally new way of reading. You will no longer be informed of current developments in Sports Medicine or announcements by leagues in the various states with a single issue, appearing at longer intervals. Instead, you can read information from the Society as well as results in international literature at much shorter intervals, published in understandable terms for everyday application as part of your daily review of eMails.
Whereas an English language edition is planned for the publication of scientific articles, current topics and questions in Sports- and Exercise Medicine will be addressed in the Dossier of Sports Medicine and on the German Theme Website. Current and relevant topics from the international literature will be published weekly in the Dossier, selected and carefully edited by our staff. Our colleagues on the Editorial Staff will review current themes on a regular basis at short time intervals. We have already collected a large number of German review articles on which we can draw from our archives.
Take a little time now and have a look at the two internet entries of the DZSM in German (www.zeitschrift-sportmedizin.de) or English (www.germanjournalsportsmedicine.com).

Sports- and Exercise Medicine is currently developing at high speed. It can be seen that many clinical disciplines are increasingly discovering aspects of sports and exercise medicine for their own special needs. Nowadays sports-medical teams can be found in nearly all major clinical disciplines. This development, which is basically very positive, does have the disadvantage that the results of scientific studies are no longer published in a purely sports-medical journal, but increasingly in the journals of the specific clinical discipline.
With the new and expanded format of this Journal, we want to give you the opportunity to become acquainted in compact form with sports- and exercise-medical topics of high everyday relevance and thus broaden your general sports-medical knowledge. This does not only mean current aspects of  the treatment of typical acute and chronic sports injuries and damage, including descriptions of recent physiotherapeutic procedures.  The almost daily increasing findings on the effects of targeted exercise therapy in many non-orthopedic disease entities are also important. 
It is our common goal to provide you with current information and to motivate you to incorporate into your daily work the important effects of exercise in the physical and intellectual development of children. And we want to urge you to repeatedly point out and emphasize to older people the necessity of long-term improvement of physical fitness.
We will achieve this goal in cooperation with you: The new Membership Section, in addition to providing sports-medical information and scientific articles, offers interactive possibilities for you as a member! In the Forum, you can discuss various topics with your colleagues in other fields and interact with them!  And you have the possibility of commenting directly on any of the publications and articles. There is also the possibility to share the article on various social media. This, in turn, helps us to make the DZSM better known and to win more authors, reviewers and even members for Sports Medicine. Thus German Sports Medicine will remain an important discipline in Germany, Europe and the world!

At the end of last year, our partner and supplierr Dynamic Media Sales Verlag with the owners Nicola and Axel Lutz announced that the publishing house would close. This news hit us hard, but we are even happier and more grateful to still have Axel Lutz, supported by his wife Nicola Lutz, as part of our team in advertising acquisition and Web administration.
As early as mid-2023, when the VFSM learned of this decision, consideration was given in various directions about which publisher should continue publication of the DZSM. The VFSM didn’t take the easy route with this procedure and held several workshops with the Editorial Staff to examine alternatives, the overall publisging community and various offers. The choice was either to pay vastly higher costs or to remove the Journal completely from the DGSP. These possibilities were soon rejected because the financial resources were inadequate, and we wanted to keep our professional Journal in our own hands.
Out of this arose the idea of establishing our publisher in our own ranks, thus saving resources and at the same time growing internally, binding colleagues long-term and from that time on gathering all managerial and organizational activities at one site. The idea of our own publishing house was born!
In mid-2024, the VFSM, DGSP and the SportMed Service GmbH founded the SportMed Verlag as a direct subsidiary of the SportMedService Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Sportmedizin in Deutschland mbH within the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sportmedizin und Prävention (DGSP) e.V. and the Verein zur Förderung der Sportmedizin (VFSM) e.V. The layout of the newly-created Logo connects the DZSM with the publisher (Fig. 1).
The SportMed Verlag is an interactive and networking solution to perform all activities within the same Organization, to enact measures to save resources and to maintain the overview of all finances and budgeting. Management of the SportMed Verlag is located directly in Ulm, along with the Editor and the scientific editorial staff. It is a great benefit for us that all freelance colleagues and editors could be kept on staff – they all make the DSZM an interesting and relevant online and printed medium for Sports Medicine.

As a member, you can access your personal Membership Section very easily via the link which we sent you per eMail, or by scanning the QR Code at the end of this editorial.
Please register once on this page (use the Button „Registrieren“), so you can use the complete service by clicking  „Anmelden“. Figures 2 and 3 show a brief view of the way the innovative Website looks: After successful registration and subsequent log-on, you will reach your personal dashboard – an overview of topics, tailored personally for you, and information about new articles. You can adapt your dashboard through your profile and select topics of particular interest about which you want to be especially informed (Fig. 2). An overview of current DGSP dates and training sessions are also found on your dashboard, as is the Link to complete DZSM issues of the preceding year and a link to new and marked topics. You can also access the Experts Forum and communicate with your colleagues in discussions and exchange (Fig. 3).
To register, you only need your State League membership number (you can find this on the address label of the DZSM or you can get it from your contact at the State League) and your name.
If you didn’t receive an eMail from us, it’s because we have no data for you, or the data are incomplete. Please contact the SportMed Verlag. The personal Membership Section is a special service for all members of the DGSP!

The VFSM and DGSP had to adapt the Journal many times over the past years. We informed you, as members, frequently about new steps, cost savings and other measures.

Strategic Further Development: Accreditation and Scientific Excellence
The DZSM has greatly improved the scientific quality over the past few years. This further development affects not only content but also structural measures to make the Journal internationally more visible and relevant. A decisive new development now strengthens the scientific direction of the DZSM:
One central strategic goal of the Deutschen Zeitschrift für Sportmedizin is the accreditation in world-wide leading scientific databases like Medline/PubMed and Clarivate. These accreditations play a key role in establishing the DZSM as one of the leading professional journals in sports medicine. Access to such well-known databases is not only important in increasing the impact factor, but also in increasing the international visibility and relevance of the journal.
The impact factor, which is based on the frequency with which articles in a journal are cited in scientific works, is an important indicator of the scientific importance of a publication. Specific requirements must be fulfilled in order to optimize this and to position the journal as an international reference work in sports medicine. One essential aspect of these demands is the availability of all published articles in English.
English is these days the international language of science and makes it possible that published articles are available to a broad, global readership. This measure supports international exchange and the visibility of published articles, which in turn leads to higher frequency of quotation and broader recognition. The English publication is thus an indispensable element for integration in leading scientific databases and the long-term increase in the scientific influence of the DZSM.

Internationalization
Another important step is the internationalization of editing processes, winning of well-known international people as editors and members of the Scientific Council. The scientific quality of the DZSM will be further increased by the inclusion of internationally known sports medicine experts and an increasingly international editorial staff, promoting global exchange. With this global orientation, the DZSM will be in a position to reach an even greater international readership and to further cement its position as a leading scientific journal of sports medicine. This measure underlines the efforts made to establish the journal as a central platform for the international exchange of research results and scientific knowledge.

Long-term Perspective: Continuous further Development
The DZSM is in a phase of continuous further development. Among the first and central measures are the mentioned adaptations in the editing staff and the internationalization of the Scientific Council. These changes will not only strengthen the scientific integrity of the journal but also raise its international visibility.
Beyond this, we are focusing on continuous improvement in the editorial processes and strict adherence to the highest scientific standards. These strategic measures make it possible for us to take the growing importance of sports medicine in the global scientific setting into account and to increase the influence of the DZSM worldwide. In the long term, the DZSM will thus not only further increase its scientific excellence but also cement its position as a  leading professional journal in an international context.

Cross Ref is a central platform for the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Sportmedizin (DZSM) to guarantee international visibility and traceability of our scientific publications. The distribution (? Awarding?) of DOIs (sollte dies vielleicht ausgeschrieben werden? Anstatt hier fast am Ende des Editorials DZSM, which has been used as such for 3 pages or so) guarantees that our articles can be reliably quoted and globally linked, which supports their accessibility in relevant scientific databases. But that alone is not enough. The continuous integration in further important databases is decisive to increase the relevance and influence of the DZSM in the long term.
An increasing number of quotes and links to global platforms not only increases the quotation rate but also improves the positioning and influence of the journal on the international scientific stage. Quotes are an important indicator of the scientific relevance of a journal and play a central role in the rating by well-known databases like Clarivate and PubMed. An inadequate number of quotations can cause considerable detriment to the visibility and recognition of a publication in the scientific community.
The Councilors and Editors of the DZSM make a definitive contribution to the increase in quotation rates by regularly quoting articles from our journal in their own scientific work. This targeted quoting supports the perception of the DZSM and increases the likelihood that our publications will be included in leading databases, which in turn strengthens the scientific visibility and the integration in relevant indices.
We would like to encourage all members of the Scientific Council and the Editors to continue actively contributing to the quotation rate by making reference to our articles in their publications. Only with such cooperation can we establish the DZSM as a leading scientific platform in sports medicine and guarantee its international visibility in the long term.

The well-known Dossier der Sportmedizin remains a central element of the Deutschen Zeitschrift für Sportmedizin (DZSM) and still offers contents of qualitatively high value in popular-scientific German. In every issue, several editors, graphic artists, a CvD along with the Editor, Chairman of the VFSM, scientific editors, the editing staff in Ulm and the newly founded publishing house work together to prepare a solid-based, scientifically relevant medium which at the same time remains understandable for a broad public.
The Dossier serves not only the transmission of current research results but also plays a central role in the popularization and the transfer of scientific knowledge to practice. It creates an important bridge between scientific expertise and the broad public by preparing complex sports medical topics in an understandable way without losing sight of scientific demands. Thus it makes an important contribution to the further development of sports medicine and its practical application.
In the new, expanded version, this format will be available in the Membshiper Section of the DZSM. We are convinced that the innovative website offers you even better access to these valuable and solid-based contents. We invite you cordially to discover the new website and to profit from this exclusive service.