We are very happy to start 2020 with our traditional January Editorial and Editor's Choice,[1]
[2]
[3]
[4] especially as this year commemorates a special date for us. Ten years ago, Thrombosis and Haemostasis endowed itself for the first time with two Editors-in-Chief, one each for Basic and Clinical Science. We are very grateful for this fruitful collaboration and these past 10 years working with you, our authors, readers and reviewers.
Christian Weber and Gregory Y. H. Lip at a conference in Basel, 2017.
In 2019, we could once more count on around 900 submissions from you, a number that has remained stable and portrays the confidence you have in Thrombosis and Haemostasis. Our Impact factor and CiteScore have maintained a stable trend in comparison to others in the field, specifically reflected by the CiteScore Percentile in the category hematology, which matched near 90th, over the past 5 years. We continue to serve as a link journal for the European Society of Cardiology Working Groups on Thrombosis and on Atherosclerosis and Vascular Biology, as well as being the official journal of the Society of Thrombosis and Hemostasis Research (GTH), the Spanish (SETH) society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis and the Australian Vascular Biology Society (AVBS).
Reviewers
We are indebted to our near 900 dedicated referees who do their best in providing reviews in a timely, highly competent and comprehensive manner.
We have to particularly praise our top 10 reviewers for 2019:
-
Diana Gorog
-
Stefano Barco
-
Erik Klok
-
Robert Storey
-
Bernd Jilma
-
Marco Proietti
-
Sergio Buccheri
-
Moniek de Maat
-
Anne-Mette Hvas
-
David Jiménez
Section Editors
We have been very lucky to rely on the expertise and dedication from 66 section editors last year. We bid farewell to Georg Breier (Germany), Elaine Hylek (United States), Lee Lai-Heng (Singapore) and John McVey (United Kingdom). We want to express our deepest gratitude to them for these many years of partnership when we have been able to count on their professionalism, valuable insights and opinions. We are looking forward to future collaboration and communication.
We also give a warm welcome to our new colleagues on the Editorial Board: Dániel Aradi (Hungary), Noel Chan (Canada), Tze-Fan Chao (Taiwan), Tobias Geisler (Germany), Yutao Guo (China), Kerstin Jurk (Mainz), Joao Morais (Portugal), Andrew Murphy (Australia), Ingrid Pabinger (Austria) and Peter Verhamme (Belgium), who have joined us as new section editors.
A special thank you goes to our last year's 10 most proactive section editors:
-
Job Harenberg
-
Samuel Goldhaber
-
Dominick Angiolillo
-
Rory Koenen
-
Deirdre Lane
-
John Eikelboom
-
Davide Capodanno
-
Vera Ignjatovic
-
Geoff Barnes
-
Tatjana Potpara
What's New?
Theme Issues, Special Focuses and Historical Perspectives
We are pleased to have published a series of theme issue articles last year, some of which already received notable attention. One theme issue focused on new therapeutic targets for atherosclerosis,[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17] the other one on platelets and the balance between aggregation and bleeding.[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]
[23] We are looking forward to publishing a new theme issue this year on Reversal of Oral Anticoagulant Therapy. Moreover, we have published a very necessary special focus article on the Clinical Use of Biomarkers last year[24] and plan one on the hot topic of NETs and Thrombosis this year.
Inevitably, today's issues in thrombosis or haemostasis take their roots in the findings and failures from the past. We decided to celebrate the full retro-digitalization of Thrombosis and Haemostasis since the first published issue in 1957 (then under the name Thrombosis et Diasthesis Haemorrhagica), by inviting “historical perspective articles”. The first of this kind focused on the management of stroke through the decades[25] and we are looking forward to publishing another on platelet inhibition this year.
TH Open
We are pleased to announce that TH Open, our open access companion journal launched in 2017, is now listed on PubMed Central and the Directory of Open Access Journals. Its unique “pay-what-you-want” policy gives everyone a chance to submit open access. As an open access publication, all articles in TH Open are freely available at www.thieme.com/tho.
Visual Summaries
We are excited to implement engaging “visual summaries” to accompany every original article and review this year. This should convey the main message of the manuscript in a clear and concise manner so that readers can grasp its contents and relevance at a glance. With the manuscript's title, it is what will capture the reader's interest to read the whole paper. The figure below illustrates how visual summaries can look like, here in the context of the journal's impact and reach. In an era where research findings are ever more disseminated through social media, such visual aids become essential.
Visual summary: factors driving Thrombosis and Haemostasis quality and visibility. Figure realized with icons freely available at www.flaticon.com. For guidelines and suggestions to elaborate visual summaries, please refer to our author's guidelines.
Stay Tuned and Be Social!
We are delighted to have appointed Tatjana Potpara and Marco Proietti as social media editors last year. They have been actively promoting specific manuscripts and news on our social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We have also published more than 20 short written interviews from first authors last year. We were pleased that the interview from Michael Fiechter on his manuscript on sex differences in inflammation and ischemic heart disease[26] was read over 600 times and that from John Fanikos on the clinical management of reversal agent idarucizumab[27] was relayed 80 times. We plan more interactivity on Twitter this year, including live discussions on specific issues and theme issue polls.
We encourage you to pay us a visit on our social media pages and to share your work via your social media networks (have a look at our social media guide https://www.thieme.com/images/stories/PDF/Social_Media_Brochure.pdf) for best impact and reach.
Challenging the Dogma
We would like to make a final remark on the past decades' growing disequilibrium between unbiased and hypothesis-driven research with the advent of the -omics era. One might argue that there is actually a bias against hypothesis-driven and heuristic research in many major journals. In large conferences, presenters ironically acknowledge the fact if their talk does not contain references or results derived from big data such as GWAS, RNAseq or t-SNE (T-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding).
At Thrombosis and Haemostasis, we strongly believe that both forms and modalities of research need to complement and inform each other to produce the most relevant research output. That said it does not necessarily have to occur in one manuscript. Hence, we strongly encourage and support our authors in continuing to create and probe new and provocative hypothesis that may even be counterintuitive or challenge existing dogma, provided that the experimental path is rigorously controlled.
Indeed, this can serve as an excellent path to break prevailing dogma and is a prerequisite for the (r)evolution of our research communities. As Albert Einstein put it: “Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” Thus, we further strongly encourage our authors to think and hypothesise against the trend, as long as the evidence collected sufficiently supports the conclusions and there is no other evidence falsifying it.
In conclusion, along with the entire editorial staff including Elinor Switzer (Stuttgart), and Thieme Publisher (Stuttgart), we would again like to sincerely thank our authors for their interest, trust and engaging work as well as our section editors and reviewers, for their dedication and thoroughness.
As editors, we have greatly enjoyed our past 10 years. We will keep bringing new ideas and innovations to your journal and are looking forward to an exciting New Year 2020 at Thrombosis and Haemostasis, may the journal keep being such an important source to clinicians and scientists!
We wish you very exciting 2020, filled with much scientific curiosity and great success!
