Greetings From the New Editor-in-Chief

Dear Colleagues,

From July, 2016 a new Editorial team will take responsibility for managing the Circulation Journal, an official scientific journal of the Japanese Circulation Society. After the extraordinary effort of the immediate-past Editorial team lead by Professor Hiroaki Shimokawa, the Circulation Journal has become one of the world-renown cardiovascular journals. Its impact factor rose from 2.4 to 4.1 during the past 8 years. Meanwhile, the Circulation Journal has become much tougher on manuscript acceptance. The new team will continue to make great efforts in developing the quality of the Journal.

I think there are several important issues to be resolved. We are now receiving more than 1,400 manuscripts per year, but the acceptance rate of original manuscripts is only around 20%. We regret having to reject many valuable manuscripts because of the limitations of journal space. It may be the right time for us to think about an additional journal in conjunction with the Circulation Journal . Second, we are receiving about 50% of manuscripts from outside Japan, but we still feel that the Circulation Journal should be more widely popular, especially in Asian countries. To increase the reputation of the Journal, we need to publish not only valuable original research articles but also informative reviews and editorials from all over the world. Sometimes these will appear in the form of controversy setting, in-depth review or state-of-the art, etc.

The new Editorial team will continue to do our best to keep and further enhance the scientific quality of the Journal so that it is recognized as one of the leading international medical journals. Finally, I appreciate all the Editorial team members for their great contributions to the Circulation Journal.

• Toyoaki Murohara, MD, PhD
• Department of Cardiology, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
• Editor-in-Chief
• Circulation Journal

(Released online August 19, 2016)