Welcome to the final issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand for 2011. There have been several exciting developments for this journal during 2011.
When the new Impact Factors were announced in the middle of the year, we were delighted to learn that this journal had experienced an increase in Impact Factor which is now 1.87, up from 0.846. This ranks the journal at 10/57 in the Thompson Reuters Multidisciplinary Sciences subject area. In addition, the 5-Year Impact Factor had also increased from 0.944 to 1.846. This reflects the much longer citation life that articles in this journal generally have.
Another development during 2011 was the mid-year launch of the new Taylor and Francis Online publishing platform to replace their Informaworld site. There have been a range of benefits: journal alert services have been improved, enabling anyone to sign up for new issue and new publication alerts; the new site is more intuitive to navigate; it has a significantly enhanced search function; immediate data on the most downloaded and the most cited articles is provided. There has also been the introduction of a parallel mobile site, giving Smartphone users access to the journal.
The success of any journal is the result of a range of factors in which our authors, reviewers and editors play significant parts. I would like to take this opportunity to express my personal appreciation of the work done by all of these people during 2011.
It has been a good year for this journal, and there is every indication that 2012 will be even better. I look forward to more interesting papers for publication, and for your continuing support.