Looking back at the EJGP in 2023: What a rich harvest of relevant publications for primary care medicine!

Fifty-five publications in two issues

This spring, the EJGP editorial team looked back on last year’s crop of articles. Volume 29, 2023, had a great harvest: 55 publications in two Issues! Issue 2, the Special Issue on COVID-19, initiated by WONCA Europe, gives an excellent impression of the family practice efforts during the COVID period. The articles came from France, Israel, Belgium, Poland, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Slovenia and Estonia; there were three collaborative international articles [1].

Issue 1, the regular issue, contains 38 publications, including 25 reports of original research. The authors came from the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Ireland, Turkey, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and Hungary; there were five collaborative international contributions [2]. Issue 1 also includes Part 7 of the Series on qualitative research methods [3], Part 6 of the Series on eHealth [4], and Parts 1 and 4 of the new Series on Patient and Public Involvement in Research [5,6]. Finally, I would like to highlight both Editorials on climate change [7,8].

The best paper of 2023

Now, what article did the EJGP Editors appreciate most? After scoring on validity, relevance, originality and impact, two articles emerged: an article from the Netherlands - about developing and validating a clinical prediction rule for acute appendicitis in children in primary care [9], and an article from Spain. However, only one paper can get the ‘EJGP Best Paper of 2023 Award’, and that is the paper by Francisco Martín-Luján and his colleagues from the RESET study: Effectiveness of the spirometry-based motivational intervention to quit smoking: RESET randomised trial. The RESET Study group conducted a randomised, controlled, observer-blinded, multicentre clinical trial in 20 primary healthcare centres in the Tarragona province, Spain. They included 614 active smokers aged 35–70 without known respiratory disease. The study shows that in such patients, adding spirometry to brief smoking cessation counselling and explaining the - abnormal or normal - results in any way as a reason to stop smoking is effective in making more patients stop smoking cigarettes. The authors describe their procedure in detail; any GP with spirometry expertise can implement it [10]. Congratulations! We hope the authors will be at the WONCA Europe Conference in Dublin in September to receive their award [11].

Acknowledging our reviewers and advisors

On behalf of all EJGP Editors, I would like to express my gratitude to all reviewers who have advised us during the year 2023. We appreciate your assistance! Your review reports provided valuable feedback to the authors and helped us make our editorial decisions. In previous years, we accepted around 20% of all submissions, mainly after 1-4 revisions. In 2023, the acceptance rate was 17%.

Finally, I thank all colleagues who accepted to join EJGP's renewed ‘Group of Editorial Advisors’. We appreciate your solicited and unsolicited feedback and your review reports [12]!

 

Jelle Stoffers
Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of General Practice
Department of Family Medicine, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
[email protected]