Abstract
This issue marks the next step of the United European Gastroenterology Journal into a new era, with a new editorial team that I would like to introduce. As the incoming Editor-in-Chief, I must pay tribute to Jan Tack who was instrumental in starting the journal. Getting a new journal off the ground is never easy, but in only 6 years he has managed to establish United European Gastroenterology Journal as the scientific voice of European gastroenterology. He was able to jump-start the journal, attract a steady flow of manuscripts to it and to jockey it to an excellent position within the top tier of journals in the field. This is a phenomenal achievement and, as the founding Editor, he deserves a premier place in the history of the United European Gastroenterology Journal. I am indebted to Jan for all the seminal work he has delivered.
The year 2019 comes with a new masthead and the entry of six new excellent Associate Editors: Christophe Moreno, Deirdre McNamara, Gabriele Capurso, Hidekazu Suzuki, Fernando Magro and Alexander Meining. These Associate Editors will cover the full breadth of gastroenterology and hepatology, and have been selected after an open call and a rigorous selection process aided by the UEG office, in particular Sorika Berner-Alteneder.
United European Gastroenterology Journal receives advice and support from a group of 30 top researchers who constitute the Editorial Advisory Board. The majority of the current Editorial Advisory Board have been with the journal since its inception and we aim to initiate a gradual replacement of Board members to bring fresh faces to the table. These experts offer their advice to United European Gastroenterology Journal, the Editorial team and the publisher, to further grow the quality of the journal.
For a bright future, we also need to nurture future talent, and that is why I have asked the UEG’s Young Talent Group to search for six upcoming physicians and researchers interested in joining the editorial team of the UEG Journal. We are looking for specialists who are interested in learning about the publishing process and taking their first steps in participating in the editorial process of the United European Gastroenterology Journal.
New to the United European Gastroenterology Journal are also our International Editors. They are the international ambassadors of the journal; they will identify new developments in their region and will tap prospective authors on the shoulder to show them the merits of publishing in the United European Gastroenterology Journal. We are assembling a team of four International Editors from China, the USA, Australia and South America.
If we are talking about a reputable journal, the question that comes to mind is ‘what makes a good journal great’? As an editorial team, we want to provide authors with fair and honest judgments of their manuscripts through rigorous and quick peer review. United European Gastroenterology Journal wants to publish definitive papers in controversial areas and help to answer questions that we, as clinicians, face on a day-to-day basis in our clinics.
As an editorial team, we want to select those manuscripts that represent a real advance over the existing evidence and that bring new knowledge to the field.1–3 In particular, we welcome randomized clinical trials with results that aid better clinical decision-making, as well as clinical guidelines. Under the Quality of Care initiative, UEG offers the field the possibility to create multidisciplinary guidelines aimed at collecting an evidence-based framework with recommendations on the diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of digestive diseases.4,5 In the near future, we can expect guidelines on disease areas such as achalasia, chronic mesenteric ischaemia, microscopical colitis and functional dyspepsia, as well as immunoglobulin G4-related gastrointestinal disease, and we welcome new initiatives.
As of 2019, we will introduce editorials. Each issue will be accompanied by an editorial that discusses the material published in the United European Gastroenterology Journal. The idea of the editorial is that it will help the reader to interpret the published results and to put them in a broader context. Each issue will now also include a narrative review, written by experts in the field. This will serve to discuss a controversial topic or highlight recent advances, with the aim of providing clinicians with guidance in handling these questions. The illustrations from these reviews will be redrawn by a professional artist in order to enhance the educational value. The United European Gastroenterology Journal will also be receiving a new cover design early in 2019.
There are plenty of challenges ahead. One of the imminent issues is the MEDLINE listing. Currently, accepted papers will only appear online in PubMed once they have been compiled into an issue in the journal. We have heard your critique that it takes too long to see an accepted paper in PubMed. Getting immediate access to PubMed is a priority for the journal that we together with SAGE, our publisher, will make in 2019.