This is welcome news, and a long-hoped-for part of our overall vision! Although citations are not our primary goal, they are crucial for survival in today’s marketplace, where journal usage governs which libraries maintain their subscription. Higher citations are a by-product of our main goal (publishing exceptional science). This is pleasing when authors have a choice of so many journals for submission.

By way of background, we relaunched the journal in 2002 (from the Australian Journal of Plant Physiology), partly to move away from the misperception that this is "an Australian journal," and partly to reflect our realigned focus. Plant science research in this century is much broader that just "plant physiology" (which conjures up images of bearded men measuring leaf length with a ruler!), and now encompasses molecular biology, tissue culture, and gene discovery. The focus of AjPP, and main criterion for accepting papers, was always how the research increases our understanding of plant function, so we decided to embody this in the new title of the journal.

Around the time of the relaunch, we focused on attracting the best science we could, through increased promotional efforts to attract higher-quality submissions from a wide range of countries, and by guidelines to our reviewers to be more critical. We also encouraged top authors who usually published elsewhere to give us a go. Those combined efforts have resulted in more and better manuscripts coming our way, so consequently the citation rate has risen.

The upswing in the amount of molecular work in plant science research has helped lift our impact factor, as much of it increases our understanding of plant function, and so is a great fit with our scope, and tends to be cited reasonably fast. I don’t dare to claim that we have brought about any great change in the direction of research, but I do hope that we have facilitated discussion through exposure of people’s research, particularly in more niche areas such as CAM and ecophysiology, through our regularly publishing Special Issues on these topics, particularly from conferences.

I have already seen really exciting research coming out of inter-faculty tearoom discussions! There is great potential for discoveries through increased collaboration across disciplines (e.g. biomedical + plant science, physics + cell biology).

All journals offer the value-adding service of peer-review, and I believe that these reviewers are the lifeblood of any journal, and deserve to be kept in the loop about that manuscript. Therefore, I look after the reviewers by sending them the other reviewer’s report, letting them know the final outcome, and sending them a reprint upon publication. We also aim to provide a forum for effective communication of advances in plant sciences, and may in future host online discussions. We offer wider media exposure through articles in magazines such as the New Scientist to highlight research with an application of interest to the general public.