At the start of my third year as editor-in-chief of Educational Studies in Mathematics, I want to express my gratitude to the associate editors who work so hard to ensure that the journal’s high academic standard is maintained. Luis Radford, Paolo Boero, Elizabeth de Freitas, Angel Gutierrez, Arthur Bakker, and book review editor Gail FitzSimons continued in this role during 2015, and we were very pleased to welcome Vilma Mesa and Wim Van Dooren to the editorial team this year to help us manage the large number of manuscript submissions. With Springer’s support, the size of the Editorial Board was also increased in order to broaden the scope of expert reviewers. As always, we appreciate the efforts of the wider community of mathematics education researchers who are called on to review manuscripts.

The pressure on editors and reviewers is unceasing, and over the past year a number of measures have been implemented to reduce the turn around time experienced by authors. These include a requirement for authors to state the manuscript word length upon submission—ESM prefers manuscripts no longer than 8000 words in order to reduce the burden on reviewers and maintain a reasonably high number of good quality articles in each issue. We have also changed the timing of reminder emails sent to reviewers so that these arrive before, rather than after, the review due date. Additional processes have been put in place to ensure that authors abide by international guidelines on publishing ethics.

Educational Studies in Mathematics continues to attract a high number of new submissions from the international mathematics education community. The dramatic increase in submissions over the past few years has abated slightly in the past 12 months: there were 260 submissions in 2012, 295 in 2013, 309 in 2014, and at the time of writing this editorial (late November), 242 manuscripts had been submitted since the beginning of 2015. These are still healthy numbers that attest to the journal’s standing and quality, with the numbers of manuscripts accepted annually remaining roughly constant.

In addition to the large number of manuscript submissions, the journal’s Impact Factor is another measure of high standing. The 2014 Impact Factor of Educational Studies in Mathematics, announced on 22 June this year, is 0.579 (Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports® 2014). The journal Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a particular year. Although this is a little lower than the 2013 Impact Factor of 0.639, the number of citations increased from 843 in 2013 to 903 in 2014—an excellent result for a journal in a specialised field such as ours.

Special Issues have been a feature of the journal for many years, and they play an important role in bringing together articles that extend the boundaries of a particular field of research. In 2015 one special issue was published on the topic of Statistical reasoning: Learning to reason from samples, guest edited by Dani Ben-Zvi, Arthur Bakker and Katie Makar (March 2015, Vol. 88, issue 3). Special issues currently in progress have the following tentative titles:

  • Mathematics education and contemporary theory

  • Communicational perspectives on learning and teaching mathematics

  • Research-based interventions in mathematics classrooms: Enhancing students’ learning of proving.

In this issue I am delighted to present the citations for the winners of the 2015 ICMI Felix Klein and Hans Freudenthal Medals, awarded to Alan Bishop (the second editor of Educational Studies in Mathematics) and Jill Adler. These awards recognize outstanding achievement in mathematics education research and contribute to the development and maintenance of high standards of research in mathematics education.

Finally, I encourage prospective authors to pay close attention to the aims and scope of the journal, as these guide the editors and reviewers in assessing manuscripts:

Educational Studies in Mathematics presents new ideas and developments of major importance to those working in the field of mathematical education. It seeks to reflect both the variety of research concerns within this field and the range of methods used to study them. It deals with didactical, methodological and pedagogical subjects, rather than with specific programmes for teaching mathematics. The emphasis is on high-level articles which are of more than local or national interest.

I remain confident that these features of the journal will inspire readers and contributors to advance our field of mathematics education.