Journal development and a thank you to reviewers

Two years after our previous report [1], we would liketo update our authors, reviewers and readership on thecurrent development of the Int J Legal Med.Mostimportantly, the impact factor has remained nearly con-stant during the last 2 years (2011, 2012), staying above2.5, even though the frequency of self-citations hasdecreased in the same period.The editors and the members of the editorial officeprocessed a total of 823 manuscripts which were sub-mitted in 2011 and 2012. Due to the excellent work ofnearly 260 reviewers working in all fields of legalmedicine, a total of 1,671 reviews were carried out.The average time for the first review could be reduced toabout 16 days. The average processing time per manuscriptremained constant at 33 days.The increased number of high-quality manuscripts sub-mitted allowed us to increase the number of papers pub-lished per volume. Nevertheless, the acceptance rate is lessthan 30 %. In addition to the impact factor, the number offull text downloads represents an impressive marker of thereputation of the journal. In 2011, there were a total of154,672 downloads. In 2012, scientists downloaded the fulltexts 278,430 times.To improve the journal’s transparency and to structure thedifferent issues of eachvolume more consistently, we definedthe main categories of topics (e.g. DNA research, toxicology,morphology, forensic imaging). Moreover, we introduced anewcategoryofmanuscript(populationgeneticdata)andlaidout guidelines for preparing such manuscripts [2].New members of the Editorial and Advisory Boardsas well as new reviewers—all of them extraordinaryscientists with special knowledge in various fields oflegal medicine—will guarantee successful developmentin the future.In the name of the publishers and the editors, wewould like to thank the reviewers for their outstandingwork (Table 1) and the authors for the high quality oftheir submissions. Without the time consuming work ofboth groups of scientists, such an impressive develop-ment would not have been possible. The members of theeditorial and advisory boards, the staff of the editorialoffice as well as the broad readership of the InternationalJournal of Legal Medicine express their sincere gratitudeto you. We greatly welcome your continued support ofthe journal.