That was the year that was 2019

As we enter 2020, I would like to take the opportunity to take stock by asking the question, how is Liquid Crystals faring in an ever more competitive environment in which authors have an almost bewildering choice of journals to publish their work in? This in turn raises the question, how are the success and quality of a journal judged? All too often we hear that a journal’s impact factor is a proxy for quality, and it has become the metric used most often to measure the impact a journal has on the scientific community. I am sure many of us have reservations about these assumptions but none the less, I am delighted to say that the impact factor of Liquid Crystals increased again in 2019, and now sits at the all-time high of 3.078. This is the first time the Journal has held an impact factor of above 3, and places it in the top 20% of over 12200 journals tracked by the Journal Citations Reports database. A frequent criticism of the impact factor is that it includes self-citations and so I am pleased to note that the impact factor measured excluding self-cites also sits at an all-time high. Some argue that the five-year impact factor is a better measure of a journal’s success and again Liquid Crystals recorded its all-time high score in 2019. Another measure of success is how the community views the journal and one measure of this is how many manuscripts are received for consideration for publication. I am pleased to note that we have seen a record number of submissions to Liquid Crystals in 2019. Liquid Crystals began with Geoffrey Luckhurst’s vision of a journal devoted entirely to liquid crystals and over thirty years later, I am confident you will agree that the Journal’s performance has never been stronger.

2019 saw the Luckhurst-Samulski Prize awarded for the tenth time. Named after the Founding Editors of the international journal Liquid Crystals, Geoffrey Luckhurst and Ed Samulski, the Prize, announced in 2008, is awarded to the best paper published in a given year in the Journal [1]. It has rapidly become a major prize in our field and the 2018 Luckhurst-Samulski Prize was awarded to the paper entitled Mirror symmetry breaking in liquids and liquid crystals by Carsten Tschierske. The first decade of winners are collected in Table 1. 2019 also marked a significant birthday for one of the Journal’s founding Editors, Geoffrey Luckhurst. His eightieth birthday was celebrated at a wonderful lunch hosted by the Publishers, Taylor & Francis, in the Winery Room of the Hotel du Vin in  Winchester (Figure 1).

Table 1. The first ten winners of the Luckhurst-Samulski Prize.

Year	Authors	Title	Reference
2009	Goodby JW, Saez IM, Cowling SJ, Gasowska JS, MacDonald RA, Sia S, Watson P, Toyne KJ, Hird M, Lewis RA, Lee SE, Vaschenko V.	Molecular complexity and the control of self-organising processes.	[2]
2010	Jakli A.	Electro-mechanical effects in liquid crystals.	[3]
2011	Skarabot M, Lokar Z, Gabrijelcic K, Wilkes D, Musevic I.	Atomic force microscope based method of measuring short cholesteric pitch in liquid crystals.	[4]
2012	Picken SJ, Dingemans TJ, Madsen LA, Francescangeli O, Samulski ET.	Uniaxial to biaxial nematic phase transition in a bent-core thermotropic liquid crystal by polarising microscopy.	[5]
2013	Pieranski P, Yang B, Burtz LJ, Camu A, Simonetti F.	Generation of umbilics by magnets and flows.	[6]
2014	Takezoe H, Araoka F.	Polar columnar liquid crystals.	[7]
2015	Alshomrany A, Clark NA.	Fisheye lens conoscopy.	[8]
2016	Dawood AA, Grossel MC, Luckhurst GR, Richardson RM, Timimi BA, Wells NJ, Yousif YZ.	On the twist-bend nematic phase formed directly from the isotropic phase.	[9]
2017	Paterson DA, Abberley JP, Harrison WT, Storey JM, Imrie CT.	Cyanobiphenyl-based liquid crystal dimers and the twist-bend nematic phase.	[10]
2018	Tschierske, C.	Mirror symmetry breaking in liquids and liquid crystals.	[11]

Figure 1. (Colour online) Geoffrey Luckhurst’s eightieth birthday lunch. From left to right: Bakir (Tim) Timimi, David Dunmur, Jim Emsley, Corrie Imrie, Geoffrey Luckhurst, George Attard, Ian Hamley, Tim Sluckin and Dominic Tildesley. Photograph taken by Colin Bulpitt.

During my tenure as Editor I have received superb and invaluable support from the Publishers and throughout the point of contact has been Colin Bulpitt. Many of you will know Colin through his attendance at conferences. Colin left T&F last year and I must place on the record my thanks to him for his unwavering support not only for the Journal but also to the liquid crystal community.

Liquid Crystals continues to be a major success and I must acknowledge the hugely important role played by the Editorial Board in driving the Journal forward. These contributions range from reviewing manuscripts, submitting their own work for publication in the Journal through to selecting the Luckhurst-Samulski Prizewinner.

I must finish by thanking the whole community for its strong and continued support of our Journal, and as they say in this part of the World, lang may yer lum reek.