It is now more than twenty years since when Izet Masic, at that time already well known in EFMI/IMIA circles, entered the world of Medical Informatics (MI) publishing by starting in 1993 his journal “Acta Informatica Medica” (Acta Inform Med), in which he continuously serves up to now as its editor-in-chief. After AIM has been accepted 2011 for archiving in PubMed Central, now its articles are cited in prestigious online databases, including PubMed, Scopus and EMBASE, crediting the continuous and successful efforts of its Editor-in Chief to raise the journal´s quality. Last year, at the MIE 2014 Istanbul, Izet Masic presented a new evidence of his inexhaustible editing energy, by gathering a respectable group of to-day´s renowned medical informaticians as authors, including himself, to edit with the help of George Mihalas as coeditor the nowadays well-accepted book under the title “Contributions to the History of Medical Informatics”. Knowing that any new scientific field (and MI is one of such fields) starts to develop by the work of its pioneers, Masic devoted a remarkable part of this book to the biographies of such persons, presented in the chapter authored by him under the title “The Most Influential Scientists in Development of Medical Informatics”, collecting 38 biographies in total. It is important to emphasise, that in the conclusion of his text Masic, aware that new scientific forces unremittingly continue to expand the initial achievements of the pioneers, Izet Masic wrote: “Let this text, which in the nature of such compendia is necessarily incomplete, be the beginning of a future Biographical Lexicon of Medical Informatics, for which international collaboration is welcomed.” And now – the result of his hard work appears in the public. In an amazingly short time we have the first edition of Masic´s “Biographical Lexicon of Medical Informatics” – a huge work containing now 430 biographies of MI scientists from the whole world. It is worth mentioning, that the acceptance of Masic´s endeavour in the MI community is very positive, thus showing that his ideas are an important contribution to the development of MI as a rather young field in the history of biomedical sciences. Consequently, as one of the reviewers of this publication I am glad to recommend it to the reader. I am also suggesting anyone who would like to add some improvements and additions to the text, as well as to recommend inclusion of some missing biographies, to do so as the author Izet Masic announced new editions to appear before future MIE and MEDINFO conferences.
Zagreb, Croatia, May 2015
Prof Gjuro Dezelic, PhD