Clinical Research in Cardiology is going to enter its fourth year as the journal of the German Cardiac Society with a focus on scientific aspects of clinical research and clinical education in cardiology. It is a member of the Journals’ Club of the European National Societies, who reported their principles of publication in 2008 [1]. Compared to the year 2008 [2], the journal has further improved its visibility as shown by the latest data from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). As evidenced by the increased number of submitted manuscripts, there is evidence that there is an increased acceptance in the scientific community of clinical cardiology.

From 1 December 2008 until 30 November 2009, 372 papers were submitted (including 39 resubmissions from 2008). The acceptance rate was 30.5% corresponding to 69.5% rejection rate. Time to first decision was 31.4 days. During the last year, 692 reviews were invited. Among those, 453 reviewers completed their reviews and 138 declined to review the manuscripts. 34 reviewers did not respond to the invitation. The majority of manuscripts were accepted or rejected after initial submission or after first revision. The details can be viewed in Table 1.

Table 1 Frequency of decision (%)
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Figure 1 shows the number of impact factor relevant articles from 2006 to 2009. These types of articles only include reviews and original papers but not clinical correspondence contributions, editorials and abstracts. There was a decline in the number of published reviews and original papers, whereas the number of clinical correspondence articles, editorials and abstracts remained similar (not shown). In parallel, citations steadily increased from 2006 to 2009 from 31 to 726 (the column in 2009 covered all articles which were published until 30 November 2009). These citations also include the impact factor relevant articles as well as clinical correspondence articles, which also contribute to the impact factor in a positive way when they are cited. The number of citations includes all citations of previously published articles in Clinical Research in Cardiology. For the impact factor 2009 (which will be published in 2010) only the citations to articles of the publication years 2007 and 2008 will be relevant.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Number of impact factor relevant articles (left) and citations (right) in Clinical Research in Cardiology from 2006 to 2009

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Figure 2 summarizes the impact factor of the “Zeitschrift für Kardiologie” (left panel) and of Clinical Research in Cardiology (right panel). The impact factor in 2008 is already higher than those ever achieved by the “Zeitschrift für Kardiologie”. However, much to our satisfaction, the impact factor 2008, published in 2009 by the Institute for Scientific Information was 2.418 indicating that the development of the journal’s visibility reflected by citations of articles of the relevant years is improving.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Impact factor development of the Zeitschrift für Kardiologie (left) from 2004 to 2008 and of Clinical Research in Cardiology from 2004 to 2009 (right)

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Again, there was a list of well-published articles. In Table 2, the ten best cited articles from the years 2007 and 2009 are listed. It can be seen that those articles published already in 2007 tended to have higher citation numbers. However, some articles are also well cited after the first years of publication [5, 9, 10]. Among the best publications, there were not only original articles [3, 6, 8, 9, 12] but also reviews [4, 5, 10, 11] and one article as a meeting update [7]. In particular, from those recently published articles one can expect excellent performance for visibility and citation numbers in the future.

Table 2 Most cited articles
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The chief editors would like to thank the editorial board, the reviewers, the authors and the readers for their continuous support of Clinical Research in Cardiology. We hope that further work on our journal will help us to increase the scientific educational quality of our journal, thus supporting the visibility of the German Cardiac Society and clinical research in cardiovascular medicine in general.