Congratulations to the winners, whose contributions help to maintain the high standard of the journal

Abstract

It takes about 6 weeks for my Editor’s Comment to appear in print, so I apologise if I am writing in anticipation of events which, to many people reading this, might have become a distant memory. We have just recovered from an excellent EAU meeting in Paris, and are now getting ready to embark on the journey to Atlanta for the AUA. The rate at which these meetings are growing is testament to the popularity among urologists of going to a particular location not only to hear people talk about urology, but also to have the opportunity to meet friends and professional colleagues from all over the world. I very much enjoy these meetings for the reasons stated above; perhaps the suggestion that they will be replaced by distance-learning and other web-mediated events might not be quite so correct after all, at least at present. Many urologists worry that the meetings are becoming too large, and while this might have an element of truth about it, the relatively huge oncology, cardiology and radiology meetings do not seem to have suffered greatly. The BJU International presents one of its major prizes at the AUA every year. The Bob Krane prize is given to the person who wrote the best paper in the journal for the previous year. The winner is decided by the Associate Editors and the Editor-in-Chief. Each is asked for a list of the five best papers to appear, and then a short list of two is chosen and noted upon. The winner this year is Alun Thomas, a urologist from the UK, who wrote two outstanding papers which appeared together in the December issue of the journal. They described the long-term follow-up of untreated patients with urodynamically confirmed outlet obstruction and underactive detrusor seen, and followed up carefully, in the department of Paul Abrams in Bristol. I feel that such longitudinal natural history studies are very important for our understanding of how, in this case, the lower urinary tract works. The John Blandy prize will be presented at the BAUS meeting at the end of June. It is given to a urologist in training for the best publication in the previous year. It is obviously aimed at a different target from the Bob Krane prize, and this year it will be presented by Professor John Blandy himself to Nathan Lawrentschuk, from Melbourne, who published five excellent papers in the journal in 2005. Congratulations to the winners, whose contributions help to maintain the required high standard of publications in the journal.