This has been our busiest year as editors ofThorax, continuing the trend reported last year.1 The number of submissions to the journal has risen again, particularly for original papers (table 1). The geographical distribution of submissions continues to reflect the international flavour of the journal, and for the first time we received more submissions from Western Europe than from the UK (table 2). Our acceptance rate (table 3) and the time to first decisions have been similar to previous years, and we have continued our policy of trying to give a rapid decision and also only publishing the best papers in the journal (table4).

The impact factor has risen further and we are now third among the respiratory journals, just behind the two American Thoracic Society publications.2 We have continued to publsih strong review series,3 ,4 as well as smoking cessation guidelines,5 BTS guidelines on control and prevention of tuberculosis,6 a supplement on aspirin induced asthma,7 and the Year in Review.8 We hope thatThorax has continued to inform, educate, stimulate, and debate, and that it will continue to do so in the future.

We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the associate editors, the advisory board, and our managers at the BMJ Publishing Group who have ensured that the journal has run smoothly. We thank the editorial assistants who have been running the journal for the last year. Hilary, Caroline and, more recently, Laura have done a superb job in keeping the journal on track. To those authors who experienced delay with their submissions at the beginning of the year when we were without our full complement of editorial assistant support, we apologise. We thank our reviewers who again have done an excellent job and whose names are listed on page 984. Finally, we would like to thank the scientific respiratory community who sent us papers as, without the high quality submissions that you send us, the journal would not be what it is today.