The impact factor continues its rise: good news from the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery--3.048

It gives us great pleasure to announce a further rise in the impact factor (IF) of the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EJCTS); now standing at 3.048, we have achieved our goal of surpassing the ‘3’mark, to reach our highest ever IF level. The virtually constant year-on-year rise in the IF is depicted in Fig. 1. This achievement is first and foremost due to our authors who have chosen to submit their excellent scientific papers to the EJCTS [1]. These papers were highly cited in the years following their publication, leading to the very gratifying rise in our IF. The 10 most cited papers published in 2011 and 2012 are given in Table 1 [2–11]. Our warm appreciation goes to all of our reviewers (more than 3000 worldwide) for their excellent and painstaking work in evaluating the submissions and producing their often very detailed reviews of the submitted papers. A vote of thanks must also go to our Associate Editors, Assistant Editors, statisticians as well as to the Editorial Office staff. Similarly, we would like to acknowledge the support and encouragement from the Councils of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS) and the European Society of Thoracic Surgeons (ESTS). Also worthy of mention is the 5% increase in the number of manuscript submissions to the EJCTS and the 23% increase in submissions to Interactive CardioVascular and Thoracic Surgery (ICVTS) in 2014 when compared with 2013. This signals the fact that our journals are an established publication medium for our peers in the field of cardio-thoracic surgery and for the specialists in our respective scientific partner societies. In summary, we are happy with the progress of the EACTS publication family: the mother journal EJCTS achieving an IF of 3.048, the sister journal ICVTS having an IF of 1.108 [12] and the Multimedia Manual of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (Editor-in-Chief Marko Turina) [13] now listed in Medline/PubMed. In the coming months and years, we will further evolve our publication media to serve the changing needs of our readers, continuing to strive for high-quality publications in cardio-thoracic surgery to support and improve our services to patients.