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Five years ago, taking up the burden of editing the Journal of Hypertension, we opened the 1995 volume of the journal with an editorial entitled ‘The new Editors' prologue’, in which we set our primary goals and expressed our hopes and ambitions. Now that our 5- year term is completed and the Board of Management of the journal and the two prestigious scientific Societies of which the journal is an official organ have asked us to continue our editorial task for three more years, we would like to initiate the January 2000 issue with a new prologue in which the old editors, besides thanking the Board of Management and the International and European Societies of Hypertension for their confidence and support, review the journal's successes and failures and verify those goals that have been achieved and those that have not. In our 1995 prologue, we recognized that the strength of a journal derives ‘from a regularly increasing flow of original papers, from which the Editors may select the most outstanding’. In 5 years, the number of submitted papers has almost doubled, with a steady increase from year to year, especially during 1999 (a 20% increase). The publishers generously agreed to increase the number of pages published, from 1437 in 1994 to more than 2000 in 1998 and 1999, in order to accommodate all papers of the highest scientific standard and clinical interest. Despite the increased number of pages available, the remarkable increment in submissions has brought the acceptance rate down to 35%, which assures the publication of high priority manuscripts only. Choosing a limited number of papers out of a much wider submission is a gift for the journal, but a burden and responsibility for the editors and reviewers. The Milan Editors have been lucky in receiving the greatest support from the Associate Editors and also in obtaining the active involvement of the members of the Editorial Board and a large cohort of other basic and clinical investigators, who have agreed to review the increasing number of papers. Through the generous help provided by reviewers, we have been able in most cases – we believe – to provide authors with constructive criticism and detailed reasons by which the editorial decision was taken. Whenever authors have put forward good arguments against referees' comments and editorial decisions, we have been prepared to reopen the reviewing process and to ask referees to exercise their patience and reconsider the authors' arguments and their own comments. Occasionally, when an otherwise good manuscript has raised some reservation from one of the referees, we have preferred to publish the paper without forcing the authors to modify or conceal their opinions, while at the same time accompanying the article by an editorial commentary by the reviewer. We have constantly not tried to make the Journal of Hypertension an archive of established wisdom, but rather a forum for scientific debate and novel findings. We are well aware that we may have not always succeeded in choosing the best of what was offered to the journal, and that the many authors who had their contributions rejected may feel, sometimes reasonably, and sometimes unreasonably, that they were not judged rightly. We apologize for any incorrect judgement, but wish to assure them all that their papers were judged fairly. There are obvious limitations inherent in peer reviewing, but no better system can yet be foreseen. The best judges of the quality of a journal are its readers, and the largely increasing number of submissions is an encouraging verdict. Another verdict is provided by the impact factor. We are not among the ‘worshippers’ of the impact factor as a measure of the quality of a paper, and believe that there can be some abuse of this index in the evaluation of an investigator's career, or of the work upon which a grant proposal is assessed. The impact factor is, however, a good criterion of how widely a journal is read and how often journal articles have mattered for subsequent publications. It is with some pride, therefore, that we have observed the impact factor of the Journal of Hypertension to grow steadily from 2.071 in the Scientific Citation Index of 1994 to 3.066 according to recent evaluations published in September 1999. In our 1995 prologue, we also promised to try and give ‘a balanced content to the journal, satisfying the interest both of basic and of clinical investigators, and physicians involved in the different areas (internal medicine, cardiology, nephrology, endocrinology, etc.) related to hypertension’. This goal has constantly been foremost in our minds in shaping the journal policy. We have been lucky, for example, that the January 1995 issue, the first one under our editorship, published a review by Björn Folkow on ‘Integration of hypertension research in the era of molecular biology’. Following the advice of this famous scientist, we have tried to keep the journal open both to new advances in molecular biology and to the integrated information provided by physiology and pharmacology. We were equally fortunate in having one of the last issues of the 1999 volume host a review by John Swales, the first Editor and founder of the Journal of Hypertension, on evidence-based medicine, clarifying that there is not any single, privileged evidence in medicine, but a number of different pieces of evidence, multiple ‘evidences’ and numerous diversified approaches. The Journal of Hypertension, within its area of interest, is open to all of these. In our January 1995 editorial, we also set the goal of rapid publication. We know that editors can always do better in this area, and contributors also expect that editors can do better. Despite the fact that during the past 5 years, the Journal has gone through a sequence of four different publishers (happily with the constant help of Caroline Black, who has continued as the journal publishing director throughout), we have succeeded in reducing the average reviewing process leading to first decision down to 2 months, and to reducing the time between acceptance of a paper and its processing for publication to less than 1 month. This has been due to the unremitting help of the Executive Editors and the efficient and devoted work of the Milan Editorial Assistants, Mrs Cinzia Tiberi, Grazia Soriani and Lidia Rossi. We look forward with confidence to the publisher's continuing support of the Milan Editorial team for the next 3 years. Another goal we have established in 1995 was ‘to steer editorial policy on a true international course’. An enlarged Editorial Board recruited from investigators representative of different research areas and different countries, and partly renewed every year, as well as a group of well-known experts acting as Associated Editors, have all helped us to broaden the international breath of the journal, with papers being submitted from all parts of the world. In the meantime, we wish to thank all those who have supported us during the past 5 years and who are willing to continue to support us. We are keen to receive comments and suggestions, and of course manuscripts, that will help us to make the Journal of Hypertension even better.
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