Dear Readers,

The European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (EJNMMI) continues to grow and progress. The last years have witnessed important developments, such as a raising Impact Factor and the establishment of the EJNMMI Journal family.

Record high EJNMMI impact factor

The EJNMMI started in 1976 (as EJNM) with a modest number of submissions and without Impact Factor. Over the years the EJNMMI has made it into the top 3 world journals in the field of medical imaging according to the various metrics available in the Web of Science and Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports. The 2017 record high EJNMMI Impact Factor is 7.704, ranking 3 of 128 journals listed in the Category of Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Medical Imaging journals. This is the highest Impact Factor ever for a Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging journal and for the second consecutive year makes EJNMMI the journal with the highest Impact Factor in the field. Its trend over the years is shown on Figs. 1 and 2. It is important to note that if one were to exclude the organ dedicated Journals from the top of this list, EJNMMI, Radiology and JNM would take pride place as nr 1, 2 and 3th of the imaging journals. The Impact Factors and other metrics for the nuclear medicine and molecular imaging journals can be seen on Table 1. We are grateful to our authors, reviewers, editors and editorial staff for helping us to make the EJNMMI the prime journal in nuclear medicine and molecular imaging.

Fig. 1
figure 1

EJNMMI Impact Factor over the years

Fig. 2
figure 2

The EJNMMI Journal Family with current editors

Table 1 Comparative metrics in WOS for all journals in the field

The journal family

As a consequence of this success, the journal is receiving an increasing number of original manuscripts, with over 1300 submissions of original articles in 2017, with an impressive number of full text downloads (> 500,000 in 2017) that reflect the influence of the journal reading on clinical practice and research. The ever-increasing number of submitted manuscripts has inevitably resulted in a significant decline of acceptance rate. The EJNMMI has a current acceptance rate of around 20% and manuscript selection is becoming increasingly challenging. Often priority issues and space limits in the journal preclude acceptance of interesting manuscripts that finally are submitted and eventually published elsewhere. As such manuscripts have value for doctors and scientists working in the field of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging, the creation of a family of EJNMMI journals became a necessity, and was started by the launching of EJNMMI Research in 2011, to bring opportunities for publication of articles on clinical and basic research, in particular for those that address very technical issues or are focussed on basic research in our field. EJNMMI Research is now a well established and reputed journal with an Impact Factor of 2.630. The EJNMMI Physics was subsequently started to offer ample space and new opportunities for articles with strong focus on physics and related areas, and is expected to have an Impact Factor very soon. The EJNMMI Radiopharmacy and Chemistry and the European Journal of Hybrid Imaging followed such developments and may have significant Impact Factors in the future. Authors may directly submit their original work to any of the family journals. In addition, papers that are considered less suitable for publication in the main journal after peer review may be eligible for transfer to the other journals in the family. In such case, the authors are offered to resubmit to the companion journal, where they may find a fast option for review and eventual publication of their work. The novelty and potential overlap with previous publications is checked prior to acceptance, to ensure that we select the most innovative and interesting papers from the many articles that have been submitted. We thank all authors for, almost always, accepting all criticisms in a positive and constructive way.

New editor-in-chief

The greatest challenge for EJNMMI now is to maintain and further expand its scientific excellence, educational quality and impact on the scientific community. It is often said that without change anyone can’t grow. We firmly believe that in life, and in scientific publishing too, it is better to make changes when things go well. Therefore, after 14 years of continuing success, and with the EJNMMI placed as the prime journal in the field, Prof. Ignasi Carrió has decided that the time has come to lay down his responsibilities as Editor in Chief of EJNMI. Springer, the Publisher, in agreement with the EANM has nominated Prof. Arturo Chiti as the new Editor in Chief. His responsibilities will formally begin in January 2019. With Prof. Arturo Chiti at the helm, the EJNMMI will keep providing excellent service and high quality scientific reports to all authors and readers of the nuclear medicine and molecular imaging community.