Publishing the European Stroke Journal is a team activity, and involves a surprising amount of time and effort from many players. As editors, we place considerable weight not just on assuring the three prime features of relevance, novelty and reliability in the work that we select, but also on interest. A young journal relies heavily on a limited number of submissions and has narrow scope for choice. Fortunately, submissions to ESJ are currently increasing faster than our capacity to publish can expand. This lets us select papers that we believe will stimulate our readers. Reviewers kindly assist on this by assigning priority scores to manuscripts, in confidence, that may not necessarily align with their recommendations for revision that are sent to the authors. In addition to expertise on the topic, we aim to have diversity among our reviewers, to reflect our readership and the stroke community. A manuscript may attract few substantive criticisms that demand a response but its findings still may have only limited relevance, novelty or application. We only rarely receive appeals from disappointed authors, but these apparent discrepancies are diplomatically challenging. However, our sense of guilt after declining a recent appeal was swiftly countered, when we received the following unsolicited message from a senior colleague:
Just wanted to write to you on what a pleasure it has been again to read the latest issue of ESJ!
I usually go through the table of contents of the major journals in our field, read the abstracts and save the pdfs of the articles that I am likely to need in the future. With most of the journals it is one or no articles saved per issue as the topics are boring /irrelevant /confirmatory, but the EJS somehow stands out as having constantly exceedingly interesting articles. With the latest issue I saved almost half of the articles for future reference.
We are grateful for these words of encouragement. They come from a valued reviewer and board member but comments and suggestions are always welcome, from any source. Feedback helps us to keep doing what is successful and to reflect on aspects that may have scope for improvement. Above all, this is your journal. We are just the current custodians.
Looking to the present issue, as always it is iniquitous to highlight just one or two papers when everything should be of interest to some readers. However, ESO Guidelines are highly respected and widely cited, and so it is a pleasure to draw attention to a new one on Primary Angiitis of the Central Nervous System.