© 2002 by European Society of Cardiology
Copyright © 2002, European Society of Cardiology
Goodbye to all of you.
The present editorial team will leave office on December 31st, 2002.
As of 1 January 2003, all manuscripts should be submitted to the new Editor Professor Hans Michael Piper: Department of Physiology, Justus-Liebig University, Aulweg 129, D-35 392 Giessen, Germany.Although originally Professor Rudi Busse was to be Co-Editor, as was announced several times in the journal, he decided that this position was incompatible with his function as Associate Editor of Circulation Research, and resigned by the end of August.
As shown in Fig. 1, the impact factor of our Journal has risen substantially. In 2000 it was 3.78, in 2001 it increased by 20% to 4.55. For 2002, we expect an impact factor that is still higher. Cardiovascular Research is now in the fifth place in the cardiovascular category of the Institute for Scientific Information, with three clinical Journals, Circulation, The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and the European Heart Journal, in place 1, 3 and 4, and with one other basic science journal, Circulation Research, in second place. Of all scientific journals covered by this Institute, close to 6000, Cardiovascular Research is in the top 4.5%.
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The Journal is electronically available via Science Direct, and has been one of Elsevier's most successful medical journals in this respect: in 2002 between 17,000 and 18,000 requests for full text-articles were received per month, amounting to a yearly total of about 210,000.
The number of submissions has increased since 1996 from 60 manuscripts per month to about 95. This inevitably led to an increase in the rejection percentage. In recent years, slightly less than 20% of original manuscripts were accepted for publication. Since we took office on June 1st 1995, a total of about 7500 manuscripts have been submitted. For 78% of the papers, we received three reviewer's reports, and two reports for the other 22%. Although at the time of writing, we still expect more than three hundred manuscript submissions, we can say that our initial editorial decision was based on a total of over 20,000 reviewer's reports. On average, the time for an initial editorial decision was between 26 and 27 days. We are extremely grateful to our reviewers for their excellent and speedy reports. They truly are the backbone of our journal, and it may be remembered that ours is the only profession where the world's experts give their advice for free (the compact disk that those reviewers who meet the deadline receive is only a token of our appreciation, although we did our best to select wonderful music). It is worthwhile to note that the comments of the reviewers are primarily meant to improve the manuscript. Overall, the reviewers recommended rejection of the manuscript in only 23% of cases. Since we rejected more than 80%, the blame is clearly on us, not on the reviewers. In an Editorial in this Issue, Tobias Opthof and Ruben Coronel provide an analysis of "geographical bias" of our reviewers.
We gratefully acknowledge the support from The European Society of Cardiology and from Elsevier Science.
It has been a pleasure to work with both authors and reviewers (our database counts over 22,000 individuals), and we trust that they will support the next Editor, Hans Michael Piper and his team, to the same degree.
Michiel J Janse,
On behalf of the Editorial Team
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  M. J. Janse The Amsterdam years Cardiovasc Res, August 1, 2007; 75(3): 451 - 452. [Full Text] [PDF]
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