LAUSR

Six years have gone by since the publication of the first issue of Clinical and Translational Imaging (CATI). At the beginning of its seventh year of life, CATI is progressively growing. The publication strategy is now very well defined, with full support of the Editorial Board and of the Publisher, as confirmed at our most recent editorial board meeting at EANM’18 in Düsseldorf where the attendees had a fruitful discussion. This Editorial is a brief report to the stakeholders on the status and outlook of the Journal. The goals that were set in the previous years have been achieved progressively, and the consideration in which our journal is held, by clinicians and scientists, is shown by the steeply increase of the number of downloads and citations. Undoubtedly, this result has been achieved thanks to the work of the entire Editorial Board. Thus, in this annual Editorial, I would like to express my appreciation to all those who, with a significant commitment, have contributed to the rise of the quality, performance, visibility and increase in citations and downloads of our Journal’s articles. I would like to ask at this time a consistency in support and submission of papers by the Editorial Board members. All of you, by active participation in meetings and personal relations with colleagues worldwide, can contribute to achieve a higher submission flow, guarantee high-quality papers and citations, as we are on the way of applying for the inclusion in the list of Journals with an official Impact Factor by Clarivate Analytics, the company that is now running the Web of Science database. Our content seems very interesting for our readership as it appears from the progression in ranking. The Journal has published since 2013 almost 300 timely updates on all scientific and clinical areas of molecular imaging, contributed by the authors worldwide; the content of each issue has become heterogeneous as we pursue the online publication, without delay, of submitted papers following the evaluation by at least two referees. We have a very fast revision and publication process, based on the very short time from submission to first decision (21 days in 2017) and from acceptance to online publication (14 days in 2017). A quick look at the Journal dashboard, that includes usage and impact data calculated from various databases, will tell you more about the Journal metrics. Over the last year we have expanded the editorial policy and review articles are classified according to four categories: meta-analyses, systematic reviews, expert reviews and mini-reviews. Furthermore, editorials, spotlight articles and pictorial essays enrich the Journal. As compared to previous years, we are receiving more spontaneous submissions and we also had an increase in the number of rejections. Papers are being submitted from all over the world with an increase from countries outside Europe and the USA. Papers related to the major areas of molecular imaging are collated and are easily retrievable under the heading “Article Collections” on the web page of the journal. The titles of the available article collections are displayed on SpringerLink to facilitate the search. CATI offers the option of Open Access publication, chosen by approximately 30% of the authors, which entails the immediate inclusion in PubMed. Furthermore, Springer allows authors to share their published article by means of the Springer Nature SharedIt link. To assist authors in disseminating their research to the broader community, Springer provides a free read-only version of the full-published article via a unique SharedIt link that can be generated by entering the DOI of the article. Moreover, by following our Facebook page, which has now more than 1000 followers, it is possible to obtain the sharable link for each paper as soon as it is published. News about the journal activity posted in various Facebook groups aimed at scientists and clinicians involved in nuclear medicine and molecular imaging reach regularly a targeted international readership. You are warmly invited to share with colleagues the Facebook posts. * G. Lucignani [email protected]