It is the 9th year since the inception of MDCP, and as the founding editors, we have seen it grow to become an influential voice in the clinical field of movement disorders. At the recent MDS congress in Madrid, it was heartening to see that almost every talk cited papers from MDCP. However, the most significant event in the Journal's short history was the achievement of an inaugural impact factor (IF) of 4.51 this year, placing the Journal within the most relevant in movement disorders in the clinical neurology domain. This has only been possible due to the high‐quality articles we received and the outstanding job from our reviewers, a supportive editorial board and a prestigious advisory board many of whom were former editors of the Movement Disorders Journal.
The success of the Journal can also be gauged by the increasing number of submissions challenging the editorial management. MDCP was conceived and driven to be a journal for clinicians who deal with patients. The task of continuing with clinical and educative material given that we are receiving novel and innovational research articles has been challenging. A spike in submissions after the 2019 indexation and after the 2022 IF announcement has led us to progressively increase the number of issues, from four per year when we began to six and then eight. We are glad to inform our readership that from 2023 MDCP will be published 12 times a year with an issue every month, However, we aim to maintain the high standard despite increasing the number of issues.
The Video Challenge is an exceptional event of the MDS meetings and MDCP is proud to publish the cases from this event in a special supplement. This provides an outstanding collection of video cases discussed by experts in the field, and this has become a MDCP classic and will continue enriching the journal content.
MDCP continues to support top‐quality clinical and academic work and give a voice to the unmet needs of clinical movement disorders to be recognized and addressed as a priority. In this regard, we had the first and highly successful MDCP conference in London which because of the Covid situation was streamed online with over 1500 registered attendants worldwide. The proceedings and the active discussions were recorded and published as video links but also with an accompanying viewpoint review articles and an editorial from named experts as a virtual collection on the Journal homepage. The conference proceedings will be soon published in a supplement and will provide excellent reference material for our readership.
We plan to have the second MDCP conference in 2023 again highlighting unanswered questions in clinical practice and unmet clinical needs in movement disorders. However, this time the program will go a step forward, focusing on disparities and inequities in the availability of therapies and diagnostic procedures in our field in different regions of the world.
MDCP, as an online journal, is represented by the 12 yearly issues but is much more than that. A home page containing virtual collections summoned by topics of interest or even driven by the taxonomic classification of movement disorders, symptoms, and treatments developed by the society containing hundreds of videos and manuscripts makes the experience of navigating the journal a unique experience.
MDCP has been active on social media platforms, with a social media editor tweeting the latest papers. Recently a new initiative of highly visual material based on published papers with sensitive algorithms, data, clinical maneuvers and workout processes for bedside use that we have named “clinical pearls” has been launched. It surely will be a valuable and popular tool among residents and young practitioners in movement disorders.
We look at the future with great anticipation, and MDCP will continue to be at the forefront as a clinical movement disorders journal. We are indebted to our contributors and the readership but also want to salute our reviewers who selflessly put in extra work to review papers. We also thank our editorial assistant, the rest of the team on the MDS side and Wiley.
It is an exciting time for the publishing industry with changes in business models, subscriptions, and terms for the desired need for open access to papers and data. We are sure that MDCP will ride any such waves and remain at the forefront, prioritizing authors, readers and overall clinical practitioners.
Disclosures
Financial disclosure/conflict of interest concerning the manuscript
None.
All Financial Disclosures (for the preceding 12 months)
None.