Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences comes of age on the 20th anniversary of publication.

A new year brings with it the nostalgic opportunity to look back on the previous year, a new outlook, and a promise of change.

This editorial is a good chance to thank very intimatly all our colleagues, associate editors, and reviewers who have devoted time and effort to perform fair and constructive scientific evaluations. The editors look forward to the opportunity to stress problems, prospects, and strategies for success in the education and professional development of all Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences readers and welcome recommendations that can be addressed in future issues.

IJBMS is one of the 24 scientific journals of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences (MUMS). The journal was launched in 1998 in Persian with English abstracts; it completed the transition to English full-text in 2008. It is a favorite of many researchers and has been free to all readers worldwide since its launch. The journal has been granted national and local awards several times previously. This editorial coincides with the yearly award of excellence for 2017 by MUMS for the third time. The quality of the journal has been recognized by the Thomson Reuters impact factor since it has climbed from below 0.5 to more than 1.4 in 2016 and has stayed above 1.4 ever since. One metric for judging impact is article citations. Judging by the number of cited papers and contribution of scientists from various fields, IJBMS has had both immediate impact and an enduring quality. Another judge of the impact of our material is the number of downloads. Over the period January–December 2017, a total of about 96000 articles were downloaded from the journal website.

IJBMS is an active journal that receives an increasing flow of papers, but it is our continuing concern to adapt the journal to the evolution of science and to publish a better journal. Thanks to the competence of the ditorial office and the efficiency of the publishers, we have reached a highly competitive publication time with an average of 3 months between the acceptance and the publication of articles. A variety of conditions have to be fulfilled for a journal to be successful. An essential one is the review process, which not only has to be rigorous and of high quality but also fast. The review process ultimately resulted in acceptance of 26% of the submitted manuscripts, which gives us a rejection rate of 74%. As the editorial team we are very grateful for the work done by the reviewers and highly appreciate their time spent on this vital activity. We recognize their valuable contribution to maintain high standards of our journal by listing their names at the end of last issues of 2017. Statistics for the year 2017 indicated that until December 1, 2017, a total of 1449 submissions were received, of which, 531 entered the peer review process, 373 (26%) were accepted and 1076 (74%) were rejected. The average review time has been 26 days. Authors have come from many parts of the globe, including the United States, China, Turkey, Australia, Finland, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom. There are a large variety of reasons why some manuscripts have a longer handling time than others. Obviously, not all reports come in on time since there are so many reasons why a reviewer cannot make his or her scheduled deadline. Often revisions are needed. However, papers that are written well and achieve a high score from the reviewers can be published within 1 month.

At the time of writing, we have published 157 articles. Of these, 132 were original articles, 12 were systematic reviews, 10 were short communications, and 3 were other types of articles. One special issue was allocated to NLRCS International Congress Abstracts.

IJBMS welcomes remarkable studies as original papers, general reviews, mini-reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, short communications, and editorials from the global basic scientific research community. All articles are freely and permanently accessible online upon publication, without subscription charges or other barriers. Submitted manuscripts are initially examined by the Editor-in-Chief or her assistants and if meeting initial requirements, they will enter the peer review process. As for the evaluation process, two or more referees are asked to advise the associate editors, therefore contributing to a thorough evaluation and often providing authors with valuable suggestions. The editorial board and managers of IJBMS try their best to develop knowledge and technology in basic medical sciences by observing higher standards of editing and publication to meet the needs of academics, researchers, and professionals. Main initial require-ments include novelty of the study and paper, fitting the scope of the journal, and full conformity to guidelines and ethical principles.

Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences is indexed and abstracted in major abstracting and indexing databases such as Thomson Reuters Web of Science, PubMed Central, Scopus, EMBASE, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Biological Abstracts (BIOSIS), EBSCO, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), Google Scholar, and Index Medicus for WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region (IMEMR) among others.

Table 1 shows the list of top 10 most cited articles according to Scopus up to 2017.

Table 1

List of top 10 most cited articles according to Scopus

Title	Volume	Issue	Citation
Pharmacological effects of Rosa damascena	14	4	69
Traditional and modern uses of natural honey in human diseases: A review	16	6	47
Cardioprotective effect of saffron extract and safranal in isoproterenol-induced myocardial infarction in Wistar rats	16	1	47
Safranal: From an aromatic natural product to a rewarding pharmacological agent	16	1	47
Silymarin, a promising pharmacological agent for treatment of diseases	14	4	40
Safety evaluation of crocin (a constituent of saffron) tablets in healthy volunteers	16	1	40
Protective effect of safranal, a constituent of Crocus sativus, on quinolinic acid-induced oxidative damage in rat hippocampus	16	1	38
Qnr prevalence in extended spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBLs) and none- ESBLs producing Escherichia coli isolated from urinary tract infections in central of Iran	14	5	38
Saffron aqueous extract inhibits the chemically-induced gastric cancer progression in the Wistar albino rat	16	1	33
PER, CTX-M, TEM and SHV beta-lactamases in clinical isolates of Klebsiella pneumoniae isolated from Tehran, Iran	13	3	32

2017 was an appropriate time for introducing some improvements in the journal. We are happy to announce that from now onwards the DOI referencing procedure will be used (http://www.doi.org) allowing a means of persistent electronic referencing to the online version of the articles. Following electronic publication in the journal’s website, the full-text of each article is deposited immediately and permanently in the ePrints repository of MUMS (eprints.mums.ac.ir), making articles more visible and easier to discover for the search engines, thereby improving citations. Authenticity of all accepted articles is now verified by Ithenticate before publication. We hope that all these improvements will make the journal more attractive.

All in all, we have good reasons to be proud of this journal with a worldwide readership. All colleagues on the editorial staff can assure you that they will do all that is possible to spread high-level scientific information and to please both its authors and readers. We invite you to remain with us, publish some of your best papers in IJBMS and read the journal on a regular basis. Looking forward to the future, the editors anticipate that new combined improvements will have an even greater impact on the readership in the years to come. What makes a journal alive are really the authors. Therefore, we wish you many results, many discoveries, and we hope that you will provide us with lots of excellent papers. Happy New Year!