The past year—and the second year of our editorship—has been a very successful one for Thorax.^1,2 We have continued to receive high quality papers for publication and our impact factor for 2003 now stands at 4.188.³ This means that Thorax is now the second highest ranked of the traditional respiratory journals in terms of impact factor, behind the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, and has now overtaken the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology.

The journal impact factor for 2003 is calculated as the number of citations in 2003 to papers published in Thorax in 2001 and 2002. The changes in impact factor for Thorax from 1996 to 2003 and a comparison with the impact factors for the other main respiratory journals are shown in fig 1.^3–5 The impact factor of a journal depends on the number of high quality papers that it publishes and this is influenced by the rigour of the peer review in the journal.⁶ For some time now, in addition to regular peer review in Thorax, all potentially acceptable papers have been subject to statistical review and this has had a positive effect on the quality of the papers we have published. The impact factor is also affected by the number of articles published in a journal and this makes up the denominator of the impact factor equation. Some specialist journals have reduced—often quite dramatically—the number of papers they publish. However, the number of articles (excluding editorials and letters) published in Thorax …