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This is our last issue as Thorax Editors, and to celebrate our editorship we are delighted to present a special issue of the journal. We are publishing editorials from our Associate Editors on some of the highlights published in Thorax since the first issue of our editorship in January 2003. We hope that these provide some insight into how the journal has influenced clinical practice during this time.
One of our main objectives at the start of the editorship was to increase the global perspective of the journal. We appointed a number of experienced international Associate Editors and this increased our pool of peer reviewers and stimulated an increasing number of submissions from all over the world. The result is that submissions have doubled over our terms as editors. Our aim for the educational content was to make it relevant to every respiratory specialist both in the UK and abroad, and we have published important clinical reviews and many British Thoracic Society (BTS) clinical guidelines on common conditions that have been popular and highly cited. We continued to publish one case report per issue and thus the acceptance rate for these was low, but we decided to convert some of our case reports to ‘Images in Thorax’ where we published a short report of 200 words accompanied by radiological or pathological images, and also ‘Pulmonary Puzzles’ in a question and answer format. We are indebted to Mark Fitzgerald from Vancouver, Canada who handled the case reports so enthusiastically for the whole editorship period and also conceived the idea of Images and Puzzles that have been very popular and educational to the readership.
We were also keen to encourage an active journal, and have emphasised the importance of letters that contribute to both the vitality and interest of a journal. …