• Cancer
• hygiene/occupational hygiene
• epidemiology

The Journal continued its tradition of service to the research community in 2011. Contributions to OEM continued to increase, and although final statistics are not in as of this writing, we expect to have received more than 700 papers by the end of the year. The journal is increasingly international, with the largest numbers of contributions coming from the USA, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, Australia, Canada, Italy, Taiwan, Germany and France, in that order. These rankings are broadly reminiscent of worldwide trends in scientific publication, but with some notable exceptions. OEM receives relatively more contributions from the Netherlands, Spain and Australia, and we still have not seen substantial growth in submissions from emerging scientific nations like China, India and Brazil, whose overall scientific output is increasing rapidly.1 We are interested in receiving contributions from these countries, whose growing economies account for a large proportion of the world's workers.

The rate of submissions continues to put downward pressure on the proportion of papers we can accept, which stands at 20% overall and around 15% for original articles. This means we must decline a significant number of scientifically sound papers, including some that have received positive comments in external review.

The papers that were published in the Journal in 2011 demonstrate the great breadth and topical relevance of the field we cover. The most highly-cited papers of the year reported on such diverse occupational and environmental health problems as prevention of occupational asthma,2 the health effects of air pollution,3 4 beryllium-related diseases,5 6 the impacts of deployment on well-being in the military7 and the relationship of obesity to productivity at work,8 as well as methodological topics related to measuring occupational exposures9 and defining shiftwork.10 Papers published in OEM11 12 also provided key evidence in IARC's decision to classify radiofrequency fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans.13

During the year we posted OEM's 2010 Impact Factor (IF, reported in 2011 as the number of citations in 2010 to papers published in the Journal in 2008 and 2009), which was 3.494. Quantitatively this represents a negligible decrease—probably within the 95% CI—relative to the 2009 IF of 3.643. Qualitatively it represents essentially no change from the year before, but a departure from an established trend of year-on-year increases since 2005. While we have been pleased with the recent upward trend in the IF, we acknowledge that the IF is an imperfect measure of the importance of a journal to its field and of the quality of the research it publishes. We take the position that if we strive to fulfil our mission to be the definitive source for information on occupational and environmental health worldwide and provide valuable service to authors and the community, the Journal's impact will grow and the IF will follow.

By all indicators, the Journal has continued to improve its service to authors. Turnaround times have continued to fall, with the average time from submission to acceptance now down to 58 days (from 100 in 2010). The average time to complete all reviews, which had lengthened in 2010 with the increasing workload, has also been cut. Our reviewers return their reports in an average time of 12 days, and as a result the mean time to complete all reviews is now just 31 days.

Other services we provided during 2011 including publishing abstracts from the 22nd EPICOH conference in Oxford, UK, which readers can view online at http://oem.bmj.com/content/68/Suppl_1.toc, and introducing several enhancements to the Journal's Web site (http://oem.bmj.com). Readers can now sign up to receive the Journal's table of contents or tailored content alerts by email and they can create personal folders on the site where they can save searches and articles for future reference.

In 2012, we hope to keep the Journal moving upward by publishing high-quality, high-impact research, serving the research community and taking advantage of new technology to provide rapid, personalised content to our readers around the world.