Ten years on

Abstract

It seems unbelievable that Chronic Respiratory Disease is now 10 years old. When it was conceived in a meeting room at the American Thoracic Society Meeting in Seattle all those years ago, it felt quite radical to consider a journal that covered only clinical topics that were germane to chronic respiratory disease and appealed to health professionals of all disciplines. Since then, the world has changed and all health economies have realised that the major challenge for the future is noncommunicable disease. When we started out, pulmonary rehabilitation was a new discipline that was striving to acquire credibility. How times have changed! Pulmonary rehabilitation has now become mainstream treatment and has the most powerful body of scientific evidence to support its widespread introduction. The health economic analysis also supports its true value as an effective treatment. The other area that has been regular subject matter for articles has been around self-management. Initially this was seen as a simple matter of giving patients an action plan and expecting them fend for themselves. We now know that this is a naive expectation and simply providing patients with knowledge is likely to be unproductive unless it is accompanied by behaviour change. Changing behaviour, however, is neither easy nor simple and requires a deliberate and sophisticated approach. We hope over the years that Chronic Respiratory Disease has raised the profile of these areas of care. The format of the journal has not changed a great deal over the decade. We started with the model of mixing original articles with clinical reviews from respected authors and less well-known authors who have been recommended by senior review series editors. Editorials have generally been linked to original articles but have also from time to time expressed the editor’s opinion but we have tried not to be too domineering. Looking back over the decade, we have taken a look at the most frequently downloaded articles and second the most cited articles. There is a trend evolving in the downloaded articles, the top three articles have been clinical review articles describing chest physiotherapy techniques, written by senior respiratory physiotherapists. The first article described breathing techniques in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the second went on to question whether there was a role for airways clearance techniques and the third discussed physiotherapy techniques in cystic fibrosis. The total number of downloads for these three articles is, at the time of writing, in excess of 35,000. These articles were published in the early days of the journal, but the bias of downloads favouring respiratory physiotherapy persists, the systematic review of airways clearance techniques during an acute exacerbation by Hill et al. also features in the top downloads list. It is pleasing to see that a number of original research articles also feature in the top downloads list; The Bristol COPD Knowledge Questionnaire was first described in Chronic Respiratory Disease and has recently been incorporated in the American Thoracic Society/European Thoracic Society Statement on pulmonary rehabilitation. Indeed the journal has been cited 11 times in this important document. The other notable category of popular downloads is the reviews of rare lung diseases. Interestingly, a review on pulmonary alveolar proteinosis is the most highly cited article from the journal, reflecting the broad scope of review articles and clinical research published. One of the aims of the journal is to positively impact on patient care, and we would like to think this