We are thrilled to announce that as predicted and anticipated in last weeks based on our estimations, the Polish Heart Journal (Kardiol Pol) has gained the 2024 two-year Journal Impact Factor (IF) of 3.7 and confirmed our undispu­ted scientific leadership among Polish cardio­logy journals. After a slight decrease to 3.3 last year, this year we have returned to a record value of this well-recognized and much-criticized journal’s metric from 2022.This result released on June 20, 2024 by Clarivate Analytics like each year to rank scientific journals present in the Web of Science database, is of particular importance since in the post-pandemic era many cardiovascular and general medicine journals have experienced a marked drop in this metric which is still considered the key, though not ideal, parameter in journal evaluation. In this context, the increase of the IF by more than 10% provides visible evidence that the Editorial Team’s efforts since 2018 to select interesting, high-quality, well-written articles presenting studies conducted with scientific rigor have brought a desirable outcome. It should be highlighted that for the first time this year Pol Heart J has been classified in the top Q1 quartile among the cardiology journals (76. percentile), which is an unexpected additional bibliometric success.

Despite several challenges in everyday editorial work in 2023, as I reflect on the past year, we have made together as a community of Polish cardiologists major advances enhancing the standing of Polish Heart Journal (Kardiol Pol) in the world of an ever-growing number of journals. I am thankful to all our authors, reviewers and readers who made this success possible.

Traditionally, I wish to highlight the contribution of all the authors of the most cited papers which contributed to our latest IF (Table 1) and the reviewers, who provide timely, incisive insights and lend their valued expertise to help ensure the quality of our journal; the most hard working reviewers who provided the largest number of reviews in 2023 are shown in Table 2. Their long-lasting support is second to none.

I would like to express my immense gra- titude to my Associate Editors who are at the frontline of everyday editorial work choosing the best articles. We bid farewell to Professor Maciej Lesiak, who has decided recently to focus on his clinical work. Wishing him further success, we hope for his support and advice in the future. Since September 1, 2024 Dr. Mateusz Tajstra, MD, PhD, from Zabrze will join our team being in charge of interventional cardiology and cardiac surgery in our journal and we are looking forward to working with him.

On behalf of the whole Editorial Team, I declare that we are committed to providing interesting high-quality content from seminal reviews on important and timely topics, ori­ginal basic, translational, and clinical science to educational case challenges, along with impactful practical recommedations of Polish experts relevant to the everyday cardiovascular care of our patients, which are available also in Polish on our website in the Educational Issues of our journal. While reading each submitted manuscript, we will continue to ask ourselves the following questions: Are the findings valid? Is the methodology rigorous? Is the topic of potential clinical importance from an international perspective? Do the findings fill a gap in our knowledge? Is the manuscript clear for English-speaking readership? We work for the visibility of Polish cardiology since this is a mission of our society. I look forward to continuing to work with a devotion to “never feeling satisfied”. At the end of my second term as Editor-in-Chief our ambitious aim is to achieve the two-year IF of 4.0, building a solid foundation for further growth in years to come. Since the next IF of our journal will be calculated based on the number of citations received in 2024 by all articles (including clinical vignettes or editorials) from Kardiol Pol in 2022 or 2023, divided by the total number of the so-called citable items published in these 2 years, I encourage all our authors and supporters to add an article from the 2 previous years to their reference list in articles which now are prepared for submission to other journals with any IF. Each citation counts and helps to enhance our position in rankings. I truly believe in a huge scientific potential of Polish cardiologists and a growing prestige of Pol Heart J is a kind of „proof-of-concept”. We can be better and we may achieve it together.

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Conflict of interest: None declared.

Funding: None.

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