The International Journal of Medical Microbiology has developed in a rather successful way over the last few years. As the Journal Citation Reports® impact factor was down to 0.5, it is not so surprising for me that it become higher in the last few years. The International Journal of Medical Microbiology has a very strong tradition, as the former journal Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie represented one of the top journals in the beginning of the 20^th century. Therefore, authors recognize this journal as an interesting forum to publish their data. On the other hand, I am quite surprised that we are not far away from an impact factor of 3. This was not really expected at the beginning.

“In our journal, we would like to publish important articles that reflect the future of the medical microbiology field.”

We changed the strategy and the policy of the journal. First, we focused the journal from a rather broad scope to a more specific area on bacteriology and parasitology, as well as mycology. In addition we published a number of interesting special issues whose articles are highly cited. These special issues cover exciting topics in medical microbiology. The authors are carefully selected and I feel they recognize that it is an honor to become invited for a review in our journal. Thirdly, we also publish mini-reviews in the majority of the "normal" issues. Furthermore, we always ask for three reviewers, therefore we have a rejection rate of more than 70%. And last but not least, we introduced the English language into all of our correspondence, papers, and abstracts, turning the journal into a really "international" one.

Aside from the aforementioned change in the focus of the journal, we included a truly international board and highly recognized co-editors into the group responsible for the journal. In addition, we try to make fast decisions.

The journal has a very strong tradition. We try to mirror this tradition with a number of historical articles composed by leading scientists, who have a rather broad overview on their field of microbiology.

Nowadays, medical microbiology is strongly associated with genomics, cell biology, and molecular biology in general. As already mentioned, we published different special issues that cover these important and exciting fields—in particular, the field of genomics strongly influences the editorial policy. Furthermore, groups that belong to the leading teams in cellular microbiology publish their papers in our journal.

The International Journal of Medical Microbiology, from my viewpoint, represents a rather broad forum for medical microbiology in various sub-disciplines that, with the help of editorials, seems to be interesting to the scientific community.

From my viewpoint the main scientific avenues will continue. Thus, DNA sequencing techniques will be more and more important for molecular epidemiology of infectious diseases. In addition, sequencing of host genes and their relation to resistance or susceptibility to infectious diseases will become more interesting. Furthermore, cell biology will cover more topics in medical microbiology.

In our journal, we would like to publish important articles that reflect the future of the medical microbiology field. We will further invite top scientists as guest editors for specific issues. Furthermore, the mini-reviews will remain as significant contributions to the development of our journal.

Prof. Dr. Jörg Hacker, Editor-in-Chief
International Journal of Medical Microbiology
Elsevier, publishers