I was invited to assume the Chief Editorship of Respirology Case Reports in early 2016. Ensuring a publication's success requires significant time commitment and is inexorably dependent on the dedication and ability of its editorial members to collaborate effectively. As a result, I was initially apprehensive of accepting the role because of the unfamiliar new challenges it would present. However, I realized not long after I came on as Chief Editor that accepting the role would be one of the most rewarding decisions I have made over the four decades of my professional career.
An important metric of success for any publication is the size of its readership. One of the most personally gratifying developments during my tenure as Chief Editor has been the four‐fold growth in the number of submissions, and the over six‐fold growth in downloads of our journal, over the last 5 years. During that same period, we have also evolved from a regional to a global publication, as testified by a growing contingent of authors and readers worldwide. Our published articles have also become a popular resource in the medical literature, with the Emerging Source Citation Index by Clarivate naming the journal among the top 10% of all case reports journals in 2021.
Keeping pace with current relevance is essential to expand a publication's readership. As we target readers who are clinicians, we have widened our content to cover case series, clinical images and videos. This has in turn increasingly attracted more submissions over the past couple of years, further raising the profile of our journal. We have also published a number of reports on Covid‐19 to aid clinicians as they grapple with novel issues posed in this awful pandemic. These developments have further strengthened our position as one of the leading educational resources in clinical respiratory medicine.
To further expand our readership, we launched the Case Report Poster Award at the Asian Pacific Society of Respirology (APSR) conference in 2019. We received significant interest in case reports, both in terms of the number of posters and attendance at the poster sessions. I was impressed by the quality of the posters, and we were able to further increase engagement with our journal by encouraging presenters to submit their reports for publication.
The milestones that the journal has achieved in past 5 years have more than convinced me that the journal has an important role within the field of clinical respiratory medicine, and that there continues to be further room for the journal to contribute and thrive. Thanks to the brilliant foresight of our founding editor, Prof. Norbert Berend, the APSR has added another gem in its publications. I am sincerely grateful to our devoted team of editors and reviewers who have given their precious time and efforts to ensure the timeliness and quality of our published articles, and Alison Bell of our publisher Wiley for her invaluable guidance. And, of course, the achievements of our editorial team would not have been possible but for our capable managing editors, Lieve and Christel, whose diligence and support made my job so much easier.
These last 5 years have been a profoundly gratifying experience. Serving as Chief Editor has afforded me the opportunity not only to expand my knowledge of many rare respiratory diseases that I would not otherwise have come across in my career, but also with the personally challenging, yet fulfilling (and dare I say, fun), experience of working with our dedicated team to grow the success of our journal. I hope my successor, Dr. Keiko Kan‐o, will find her tenure a similarly fulfilling experience. As I leave this role, I express my deepest appreciation to all my wonderful colleagues and the authors and readers of our dynamic and ever evolving journal.
Lai CKW. Time to say goodbye. Respirology Case Reports. 2022;10:e0926. 10.1002/rcr2.926