The winners of the GRAMMER European Spine Journal Award 2002/2003 and the increased impact factor of the journal

Abstract

The winners of the fourth GRAMMER European Spine Journal Award were announced at the annual meeting of the Spine Society of Europe, which took place between 1 and 4 October in Prague. The award is donated on an annual basis for the best basic science paper published in the European Spine Journal in the last academic year. This year, out of a total of 24 papers qualifying as basic science, two winners were selected: Induction of matrix metalloproteinase-2 and -3 activity in ovine nucleus pulposus cells grown in three-dimensional agarose gel culture by interleukin-1b: a potential pathway of disc degeneration, by B Shen, J Melrose, P Ghosh and TKF Taylor [3] Intradiscal application of hyaluronic acid in the non-human primate lumbar spine: radiological results, by Michael Pfeiffer, Ulrich Boudriot, Dunja Pfeiffer, Natascha Ishaque, Werner Goetz and Axel Wilke [2] The GRAMMER AG, GRAMMER OFFICE, the European Spine Journal and the award committee would like to congratulate the winners. This year for the first time the prize was €20,000, making it the largest award in spinal research worldwide. €10,000 were donated by GRAMMER, and €10,000 by the European Spine Journal. The awarded papers were selected by an interdisciplinary committee from the Editorial and Advisory Board of the European Spine Journal. The people on the committee were, as in previous years, Anne F. Mannion, BSc, PhD (Zurich, Switzerland), Sally Roberts PhD (Oswestry, United Kingdom), Max Aebi, MD, FRCS(C), (Berne, Switzerland), Kjell Olmarker, MD, PhD, (Gothenburg, Sweden) and Hans-Joachim Wilke PhD, (Ulm, Germany). Also included on the committee were the original reviewers of each submitted paper, who evaluated the respective papers according a ranking system for the award. Therefore, each paper was individually rated by experts in the specific field as well as by an interdisciplinary committee, which guaranteed an objective selection process. The ranking of the papers was determined by five criteria, which consider originality, soundness of materials and methods, results, quality of presentation and relevance. Because of the high quality of many papers, it was difficult to choose a single winner. The committee therefore decided to split the award between two outstanding papers. At this point I would like to thank the committee for their efforts. The committee definitively agreed that the quality of the papers in general has steadily increased over the last few years. This is also objectively proven by the rise in the journal’s impact factor. The journal impact factor for a particular year is given by a number representing the number of citations a specific journal gets in that year for papers published in the two preceding years, divided by the total number of papers published in that journal during the same two-year period [1]. The impact factor for the European Spine Journal last year (the first year the journal had been given an impact factor) was 0.966 (IF for 2001). This year it has already increased to 1.232 (IF for 2002). This means that our journal climbed in the ranking from 19th to 11th out of 42 orthopaedic journals and from 84th to 75th out of 137 neurology journals. I would like to use this opportunity to express our thanks to all the authors as well as the reviewers and the editorial board members for their contributions, which help improve the quality of our European Spine Journal.