As the new Associate Editor for Special Features and Innovation in 2020, I had the great honor of starting two unique initiatives for World Journal of Surgery. “My First Paper” allowed us to encourage and celebrate new surgical scientists to publish their first manuscript in our journal, and thus expanded their readership at a global level. Over the past year, we published the first scholarly work of 30 new scientists from nearly all continents (I am excluding Antarctica… at least for this year). Seeing their hard work come to fruition was exhilarating and inspiring. We look forward to continuing this feature in the upcoming year. As stated on social media, @WorldJSurg on Twitter, it is never too early or too late to do great research.

Our second feature was “We Asked the Experts”. We published nine important, practical, and pertinent topics authored by invited foremost specialists in the world. We hope that this feature can be useful to all surgeons across the globe in dealing with common, but difficult clinical issues, and can bring international expert opinions and wisdom to our readers.

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