• General expertise

This  journal aims to be the definitive international source for important and relevant information on occupational and environmental health research and practice, and in 2012 we continued to fulfil that mission.

The number of papers submitted to the journal peaked in 2010 at about 700 after rising steeply for several consecutive years, but since then has declined modestly to about 660 papers in 2012. Despite the mild slowing of the submission rate, publishing in OEM remains very competitive, with only 15% of original research papers accepted in 2012. This level of competition unfortunately requires us to decline many interesting, well written papers on a wide range of topics.

As highlighted a year ago, OEM is truly a global journal.1 In 2012 this trend continued and, while authors in the USA and the UK contributed the majority of papers, we also received many submissions from the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Finland and, importantly, China. The appearance of China among the countries contributing most actively to the journal is a new development, but is consistent with current trends in scientific publishing.2 While submissions are still …