More than 25 years ago Ron Walker and Mike Knowles approached the publishers Taylor & Francis with a proposition for a new journal. Although research on food additives and contaminants had been a major activity worldwide in many laboratories, at that time there was no single journal that brought these diverse aspects of food quality and safety together in one place. A steadily growing list of residues and contaminants was emerging for which methods of analysis, surveillance, evaluation, and control were being developed and refined. Food Additives and Contaminants was launched in January 1984 with the strap line ‘Analysis, Surveillance, Evaluation, Control’ setting out the scope of its breadth of coverage. There were only four issues in 1984 comprising 55 papers and a total of 359 pages. This included 19 papers dedicated to the Proceedings of a Symposium on ‘Carcinogenic Risk Assessment of Veterinary Drugs’. Twenty-five years on there are monthly issues of the journal and for 2007 there were 165 papers and more than 1500 pages.
Looking at the subject areas of papers published in 1984 it is surprising how many areas are still as topical today. In 1984 there were papers published on heavy metals, pesticide residues, flavourings, mycotoxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), migration from packaging, glycosinolates, and chlorinated contaminants. Veterinary drug residues featured large in the first year of the journal with 22 papers (40%) on this subject. N-nitrosamines in food was also a significant topic at that time, with the journal publishing some five papers. In contrast, whilst in 2007 there were 14 papers published on veterinary drug residues, there was only one paper published on N-nitrosamines. It is not that all problems have been solved for N-nitrosamines, as characterization of non-volatile nitrosamines proved somewhat intractable, but rather there is a certain topicality in food safety making some areas fashionable for researchers. This is often driven by regulatory concerns and, for example, PAHs were of major interest in the 1980s, then declined dramatically in interest, but have seen a revival with the introduction of new European Union limits for foods for some 15 specified priority PAHs. Of course, new contaminants have also been identified with acrylamide and furan representing recent examples of ‘hot topics’. Indeed, in 2007 the journal published a supplement on ‘Progress in Acrylamide and Furan Research’.
Another major change between 1984 and 2007 has been in the countries of origin of submitted and published papers. Although always seen as an international journal, with Regional Editors across 13 countries, in 1984 all published papers were from Europe, Canada and the USA. In contrast, in 2007 apart from the European Union, USA and Canadian papers, there have been publications with authors from Argentina, Benin, Brazil, China, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Serbia, South Africa, Taiwan, Togo, and Turkey truly reflecting the international standing of the journal.
Throughout the years the journal has been prominent in the mycotoxin field and also in migration from food-contact materials. Both fields are multidisciplinary and there has been some logic from a food safety perspective in drawing them together into a single publication. The journal has published many Proceedings from mycotoxin conferences, e.g. ‘Advances in Genomics, Biodiversity and Rapid Systems for Detection of Toxigenic Fungi and Mycotoxins’ in October 2007 and will publish the ‘Proceedings of the IUPAC Symposium on Mycotoxins and Phycotoxins’ held in Istanbul, Turkey, in early 2008. The journal is committed to being a high-quality research journal in the mycotoxin field. For food packaging migration it has published the Proceedings of three ILSI Symposia (1997, 2002, and 2005) and will publish the Proceedings of the 4th ILSI Packaging Symposium in 2009, being the journal of choice for research on migration from food packaging.
As we move forward into the next 25 years, the journal is increasing the number of pages per issue for 2008 to cope with the rapid growth in submissions. Its impact factor has steadily increased and for 2006 stood at 1.78. Editors and referees are being increasingly selective in papers being accepted, both to maintain and enhance the impact factor, but also to balance the large number of submissions with available journal space. For the future we are looking at new and exciting ways in which surveillance papers might be handled to ensure uniform quality standards, rapid publication, and make them available to users in a more interactive format.
John Gilbert, Elke Anklam and Tim Phillips