On 1 July 2009, the International Journal of Legal Medicine instituted an electronic manuscript submission and reviewing process by introducing Editorial Manager [1]. In the meantime, the editorial board was strengthened with the addition of T. Bajanowski [2], and B. Brinkmann terminated his work as Editor-in-Chief [3]. Now, 20 months later, we feel it is time to analyse the development of the journal during this eventful period.

First of all and most importantly, the impact factor rose yet again from 2.574 in 2009 to 2.793 in 2010. This could not have been achieved without the intensive work and excellent collaboration of all editors and reviewers.

In the 16 months from 1 July 2009 to 31 October 2010, a total of 455 manuscripts dealing with all fields of legal medicine were submitted to the journal office (Table 1). This is a significant increase over previous years. This is predominantly due to an increased number of manuscript submissions from Asia, and it is probably a consequence of the introduction of the electronic manuscript submission system. In total, 1,132 reviews were requested, and 918 times, a reviewer agreed to review (81%). As of the end of December 2010, the reviewing process had come to a final decision for 429 manuscripts (139 were accepted, 290 rejected; a rejection rate of 69%). It proved possible to reduce the average time required for a final decision to 37 days (Table 2).

Table 1 Number and type of manuscripts submitted to the Int J Legal Med in the 16-month period, 1 July 2009 to 31 Oct. 2010
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Table 2 Average time required for the administrative steps of the peer-review process
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As editors, we are aware that the success of the journal depends mainly on thorough and timely reviewing. Therefore, we would like to express our respect and gratefulness to all 160 scientists who worked actively as reviewers for the journal in this time period. In the following, the names of all reviewers are listed in order of the number of reviews completed (Table 3).

Table 3 Names of all reviewers are listed in order of the number of reviews completed
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