LAUSR

The Best Manuscript Awards are bestowed annually by the Editors of Circulation Research to recognize the most outstanding articles published in the journal. The 2017 Best Manuscript Awards were selected from articles published between November 2016 and October 2017 based on novelty, impact, data quality, and number of online downloads by Circulation Research readers. These nonmonetary awards were presented at the Editorial Board dinner in Anaheim, CA, on November 12, 2017. As part of our new initiative to highlight first authors1 and early career researchers,2 this year we are starting a new tradition of highlighting the first authors of these award-winning articles. For each article, we have asked the first author to provide us with an interesting behind-the-scenes anecdote or insight about the research described in their article. The purpose is to give readers information that is not normally available for published articles, such as how much work the study required, how long it took, the most frustrating aspects of the project, the most gratifying aspects of the project, turning points, critical junctures, etc. We hope this initiative will help readers appreciate the difficulties inherent in performing and publishing a study as well as the human dimension of these endeavors. These things are not mentioned in the published articles and could be likened to the hidden side of the moon. There is much more to a study than what is written in published manuscripts! ### Meta-Analysis of Genome-Wide Association Studies for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Identifies Four New Disease-Specific Risk Loci Gregory T. Jones, Gerard Tromp, Helena Kuivaniemi et al, and Matthew J. Bown Circ Res . 2017;120:341–353 Gregory T. Jones: This paper was a truly global collaborative effort involving over 120 authors from dozens of institutions spread across the world and took approximately 2 years to complete. For many of the contributors, it was their first time in a consortium of this type, and …