In 1909, Clinical Research in Cardiology was established as Zentralblatt für Herz- und Gefäßkrankheiten by Max Herz. Volume 3 was published by Theodor Steinkopff Verlag Dresden-Leipzig in 1911. On the 3rd of June 1927, the German Cardiac Society was founded by Prof. Bruno Kisch at the “fifth Seminar for Physicians about Arrhythmias of the Heart”. “The whole process of founding did not even take 3 min”, Kisch recalled the beginning of the German Cardiac Society for Circulation Research on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the DGK in 2002 [1]. In 1928, the journal became the official organ of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kardiologie – Herz- und Kreislaufforschung (German Cardiac Society). After World War I, the journal was reinstituted by Konrad Spang. The Society of Pediatric Cardiology, the Society of Cardiac Rehabilitation and the subdivision of Cardiology of the German Internal Medicine Association chose the Zeitschrift für Kardiologie as their official journal. While the journal was originally published in German, in 2005, the board of the German Cardiac Society and the editors of the Zeitschrift für Kardiologie took the decision to publish all papers in English following a short transition phase. The reason was to increase visibility of the scientists, in particular researchers from Germany, and to attract an international readership and international investigators to publish in the journal. In 2006, the name of the journal was changed to Clinical Research in Cardiology. Since then the journal has been successively transferred into an internationally oriented journal published exclusively in English.

The goals of Clinical Research in Cardiology journal are:

  1. 1.

    Publication of clinical sciences in cardiology with high international and national recognition.

  2. 2.

    Providing a platform for in-depth discussion of scientific controversies in clinical cardiology.

  3. 3.

    Promotion of continuous medical education in clinical cardiology covering the broad spectrum of cardiovascular diseases.

  4. 4.

    Providing clinicians with cases to foster practical education of students, doctors, and training of staff physicians.

Clinical Research in Cardiology is one of the numerous journals published under the auspices of the European Society of Cardiology supporting European science in cardiology. Since 2006, the number of submitted papers has increased continuously and the rejection rate remains quite high (Fig. 1). The citation index is steadily rising with the journal listed in ISI and the last impact factor published in 2013 being 3.6. Table 1 summarizes the list of best published papers. The spectrum of these highly cited papers ranges from new topics such as renal denervation, interventional cardiology with new stent developments and antiplatelet therapies as well as pericarditis to well-established topics such as pulmonary hypertension and aortic valve interventions and heart failure [2–11].

Fig. 1
figure 1

Clinical research in cardiology—final dispositions

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Table 1 The ten best cited papers for Clinical Research in Cardiology 2013
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Clinical Research in Cardiology and the Editors in Chief want to thank the active reviewers, authors, and the staff members of Springer-Verlag for their continuous help and support. The names of the members are listed in Table 2. Original and well-performed studies as well as an active editorial and reviewer board have helped to support the goals of Clinical Research in Cardiology in promoting excellence in cardiovascular science and education and to promote visibility of the German Cardiac Society in particular and of European cardiology in general.

Table 2 Top reviewers for Clinical Research in Cardiology in 2013. The grading is based on the number of papers reviewed
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