We are pleased to see Thorax back as the respiratory journal with the highest impact factor in Europe (2.3, ISSN Statistics 1998). This undoubtedly reflects the high quality of submitted papers. Our review system is still working extremely quickly. The median time to first decision was 56 days for full papers and 24 days for short papers, which compares favourably with last year’s figures and is a marked improvement on previous years (table1).1 We believe that this decision time is by far the most rapid of any respiratory journal. Our policy of only accepting the best papers2 is reflected again in the acceptance rate which, for papers submitted in …