The European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing

Congratulations! With this issue, the 8th volume of the European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing (EJCN) is on your desk. The EJCN is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge in the field of cardiovascular nursing: promoting evidence-based clinical practice in order to improve the quality of nursing care for patients with cardiovascular disease. The EJCN is the journal of the Council on Cardiovascular Nursing and Allied Professions (CCNAP) of the European Society of Cardiology 1. The previous years the Journal has gone trough a healthy growth with over 70 submissions of manuscripts in 2008 from countries from all continents. We can assure you that the editorial team is dedicated to carefully consider the quality of each paper and select the best papers for publication. To start, every submitted manuscript is firstly assessed by at least one member of the editorial team and consequently — if appropriate — send out for review to 2–4 peer reviewers. The editorial team appreciates if the authors supply names and addresses of three potential reviewers, who are not involved in the manuscript or have a conflict of interest, to whom the manuscript might be sent for review. Reviewers are selected based on their experience with the topic or research method. Every time we send out a request for review we realize that this is a tremendous task for every reviewer. All editors are most grateful to the reviewers who dedicate their time to this job with the ultimate goal to improve the quality of the manuscripts. We would like to thank these reviewers and hope that those who have served this year will continue to do so and I would invite anyone who is interested in reviewing manuscripts from either a clinical or scientific focus to contact us and express their willingness to help improve the quality of the European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing even further. Every year during the annual spring meeting of the CCNAP our editorial board meets and discusses strategy of the journal. For this international editorial board, members are selected from a wide field of experience, from different parts of the word and with different fields of clinical, research or education expertise. As an editorial team we highly appreciate the input of the members of the editorial board. The past years we have published four regular issues and one supplement with abstracts from the annual spring meeting. This limited amount of space makes it necessary to prioritize publication and be even more selective to be sure to publish the most interesting papers with best quality. Some authors might be disappointed to see their paper on which they worked so hard cannot be published and therefore is rejected. We always try to motivate the reason for rejection and hope the authors can use this to improve their work and try to submit it elsewhere. We also hope that this will not discourage people to submit their future work to the EJCN. In the next year we hope that many of you and your colleagues will be involved in the EJCN, either as a reader, author, reviewer or member of the editorial board. In every volume we try to include papers on chronic and acute care, grown up congenital heart disease, cardiac rehabilitation, primary and secondary prevention, heart failure, acute coronary syndromes, interventional cardiology, cardiac care and preventive cardiology. We would like to invite anyone who would like to be involved in further improving the EJCN to feel free to express their thoughts and ideas to further increase the quality of the EJCN.