We are once again approaching Christmas and the New Year at the time of writing. This is a time of the year when people look forward to a deserved break from work, a family reunion, celebration with friends, a hug from a loved one, a Christmas present and a reward for the year’s hard work. This year, the Journal has received probably its best Christmas presents thus far. In June of this year, we were selected for coverage in ISI® services and became indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded™. Last month, we were overjoyed to learn of MEDLINE acceptance of the Journal, with indexation from Volume 12, 2009. These are great achievements indeed. On behalf of the Editorial Board, I would like to thank Professor PH Feng once again for his vision in starting APLAR’s own journal, members of the APLAR Executive Committee for their continued support, the Board of Advisors for their wisdom, authors and other contributors for their excellent contributions, and reviewers for their unfading support. ISI’s basic mission is to provide comprehensive coverage of, and access to, the world’s most important and influential research journals. Each year, ISI’s editorial team aims to identify and evaluate promising new journals. Only 10–12% of nearly 2000 new titles evaluated are selected. Criteria for selection by ISI, ranging from the qualitative to the quantitative, include: editorial content; the calibre of the editorial board and authors; grant funding; peer-review; citation analysis; and international diversity. Science Citation Index Expanded™, is made available online accessed via Web of Science®, and provides researchers, administrators, faculties and students, with quick, powerful access to the bibliographic and citation information they need to find research data, analyze trends, journals and researchers, and share their findings. It helps to overcome information overload and focus on essential data from over 6400 of the world’s leading scientific and technical journals across 150 disciplines. MEDLINE® (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is the US National Library of Medicine’s® (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains over 16 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. The decision whether or not to index a journal for this service is an important one and is made by the Director of the National Library of Medicine, based on considerations of both scientific policy and scientific quality. The Board of Regents of the Library sets policy for the Library, and the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC) has been established to review journal titles and assess the quality of their contents. With the Journal now being indexed, we will gain an ‘impact factor’ which, from now on, will be a gauge of our success. The first impact factor will be available in 2010, and is calculated based on the number of citations in 2010 of papers published in the previous 2 years. The figure is likely to be a modest one and our most important next step is to ensure future published articles are of high standard that attract wide citations. The Editorial Board will continue to encourage regionally relevant articles, including reviews, treatment guidelines, original articles and interesting case reports. However, it is ultimately quality, not quantity, that matters. In an earlier Editorial, ‘Publish or Perish’, Professor Kevin Pile1 highlighted the many pressures that clinicians and scientists are under to publish. In the same issue, Torralba et al.2 stressed the importance to ensure the integrity of physicians and authors of clinical trials from this region of the world. Thanks to APLAR’s support, efforts will continue to be made to raise the standard of research in our region and encourage trainees and Fellows to submit their best work to the Journal. For example, in the APLAR Review Course held in Manila in November this year, half the day’s sessions were devoted to designing clinical research studies and writing scientific articles. Similar workshops will be organized at the APLAR 2010 Congress to be held in July 2010 in Hong Kong. Recently, APLAR has also approved a ‘Best Paper of the Year’ prize to be awarded annually to the principal author from APLAR region for a paper which has achieved the highest full text downloads, and received the most citations and editor’s votes. To help Fellows from non-English speaking countries with language difficulties, funding may be available from APLAR to hire a freelance English science article writer for assistance with articles of high scientific value. Clearly, a lot more needs to be done. For now, let us enjoy the festive season and may I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!