After more than 10 years, February’s issue of the Australasian Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine (AJUM) represents my last as Editor‐in‐Chief (EIC). I have loved it! When I took over from Associate Professor George Larcos in 2011, the green AJUM was already a stand‐alone quarterly scientific journal. In fact, February 2007, under the editorship of Professor Ron Benzie, represented a defining moment for the Australasian Society of Ultrasound in Medicine (ASUM), when the ASUM Bulletin was formally discontinued and the green AJUM was born.
In February 2012, ASUM made a critical decision to recruit Dr Jocelyne Basseal into the Managing Editor role for the journal. Jocelyn worked passionately and tirelessly to reposition the journal as the premiere multidisciplinary ultrasound journal in Australasia. In February 2013, together we launched the new rebranded blue AJUM, which further continued the journal's ever increasing profile.
In 2014, AJUM achieved PubMed Central (PMC) listing, which meant that all publications between 2009 and 2015 were visible on PubMed. November 2015 represented the journal's last issue with Minnis Journals.
In February 2016, the journal changed publishers and became part of the Wiley international collection. Together, we introduced the ScholarOne system which facilitated the streamlining of the peer review process. Increase in submission rates, faster review processing and greater diversity of manuscripts meant the journal was well positioned for the next 5 years. 2016 also represented the AJUM’s listing with the EBSCO academic collection and Google Scholar.
In 2017, we launched the AJUM’s social media profile and created an International Advisory Editorial Board. That same year, ASUM in conjunction with the Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control (ACIPC) published the highly cited and downloaded ‘Guidelines for Reprocessing Ultrasound Transducers’.
In 2018, the journal achieved EMBASE indexation as well as launching our extremely popular educational ‘How to…’ articles. These have included ‘How to perform an ultrasound to diagnose endometriosis’ and ‘How to perform a sonographic morphological assessment of the fetus at 11–14 weeks of gestation’. These ‘How to…’ articles have gone on to be some of the most cited and downloaded AJUM papers ever.
In February 2019, we published the hugely successful inaugural PoCUS special issue. In September that same year, we launched AJUM CPD. We also achieved SCOPUS indexation, further enhancing the journal’s reputation as a genuine contributor to the scientific literature. Altmetric data skyrocketed for the journal in 2019 with the release of ‘Pre‐eclampsia and long‐term cardiac dysfunction: A review of asymptomatic cardiac changes existing well beyond the post‐partum period’.
In 2020, our Managing Editor Jocelyne moved on after an incredibly productive and passionate association with the journal. She had spent 8 years chasing associate editors, reviewers and authors as well as pushing Wiley to ensure that each issue of the AJUM was professional, obsessively formatted and scientifically sound. Her efforts to strive for excellence will be an enduring legacy. Incredibly, the article downloads in 2020, via the Wiley online library, were in excess of 135,000 (up from 79,930 in 2019).
In 2021, we decided to continue our productive relationship with our publisher Wiley, extending their tenure for another five years. In handing over to my EIC successor, we will achieve MEDLINE in this time … and then the hard work will really begin. For me personally, it has been an amazing experience being affiliated with the journal, the team of associate editors, reviewers and Jocelyn. The editorial board of volunteers, who are the pillar of the journal, should be thanked and congratulated for their late evenings and weekend contributions. Their input and time have guaranteed that the AJUM will have continued success. The ASUM Board also deserves gratitude for their unwavering commitment to the AJUM and in turn their membership. To our readers and future authors… don’t stop using, teaching, learning about and most importantly researching ultrasound.
Authorship statement
Nil.
Funding
No funding information is provided.
Conflict of Interest
Nil.