Acknowledgment of Reviewer performance in 2008

Jos A. E. Spaan 0 0 J. A. E. Spaan (&) Amsterdam, The Netherlands Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. - It is going well with Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing (MBEC)! As explained in a series of editorials over the past few years, structural changes were implemented in the journal at practically all levels [25]. The most important changes were teaming with a new publisher, Springer, and establishing a new editorial team. The aim, clearly underwritten by the Administrative Council of the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE), was to increase the impact of MBEC as measured by the indices published on the Web of Science [1] (http://science.thomsonreuters.com), (i.e., the Impact Factor, IF). We have always seen this as a joint effort of all involved. We also knew that this was a slow process, especially because the indices used to compute the IF cover the journals production and influence over a series of years. For understanding and support to this process, I am grateful to the efforts of IFMBEs Federation Journal Committee over these last years. Recently the indices have been updated and indeed success is now measureable and reported publically. Our IF for 2008 increased by 40% to 1.38, but more importantly, we anticipate a further significant increase next year based on the citations to MBEC papers published in 2007 and 2008. Another indication of the MBECs increased visibility is the observation that the number of citations to all papers published in MBEC over the 47 years of its existence, increased in 2008 by 30%. This increased citation rate is to MBEC papers accepted under (...truncated)