Message from the Editor-in-Chief

2019 saw the first full year of my independent leadership of the journal HPB following on from decade of development of the journal under James Garden.  During James' tenure and since his departure the major challenge for the journal has been the incredible rise in new manuscript submissions to the journal.  I am not complaining, indeed we are delighted that the journal is so popular but the management of the volume of manuscripts can be difficult.  The acceptance rate for manuscripts is sitting around 27%, which means that we do have to disappoint people sometimes.  Keeping a short decision time is something that we know our authors value but to do this we rely on our reviewers to complete assignments that they have accepted and wherever possible in a timely fashion.

We were delighted to have Ellen Hagopian join our editorial team and sorry to see Ryan Groeschl move off to concentrate on other things but grateful for his support of the journal.  Tara Kent, Michael D’Angelica, Saxon Connor, Ewen Harrison and David Cavallucci make up the rest of our excellent leadership team and I am grateful to them for their insightful judgement and service in highlighting the important new developments in HPB surgery.

We have managed to maintain the impact factor of the journal above 3 in what is a very competitive environment.  We are encouraged to have received some excellent quality randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses over the past year and we hope that this is a sign of the continued improvements in quality that the journal can expect.  We are grateful to our publishers Elsevier and in particular Ash Allan and Emma Pendle and to the President of the IHPBA Martin Smith and Kevin Conlon, Chair of the Publications Committee for their ongoing support of the editors and the journal. 

Ultimately HPB is your journal and the most important HPB journal for practicing HPB surgeons, so please do send us your best work, do cite our papers and do keep reading and reviewing when invited. Together we can take HPB to new limits.

Best wishes for 2020.

Steve Wigmore 
HPB Editor-in-Chief

 

ALSO IN THIS CURRENT NEWSLETTER

PRESIDENTS WELCOME
SECRETARY GENERAL REPORT
WORLD CONGRESSES
AWARDS & FELLOWSHIPS
JOIN AN IHPBA COMMITTEE
RECRUITING FOR EARLY CAREER SURGEONS GROUP
EDUCATION & TRAINING UPDATE
IHPBA FOUNDATION
IMPORTANT DATES FOR 2020