This editorial marks my first year as Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, and although it appears here in our December issue, it actually went “to press” in September. By then, I had dedicated more than eight months to reading, reviewing, critiquing, and editing almost 500 submissions to the Journal. While this is early in what I hope will be a long tenure in this post, it is an appropriate time to reflect on what has transpired over these early months and also to convey some thoughts on how to shape our Journal’s publishing future.

This has been a momentous year for the Journal – one in which we celebrated our 60^th anniversary1 and one in which we continued to realize significant growth. This progress is reflected in our growing readership, with the Journal’s subscriber base at its largest ever, as well as in our publication’s evolving overall “impact” on our field. Our 2013 impact factor – namely, the ratio of the number of articles from the Journal’s 2011-2012 contents cited in the 2013 scientific literature compared with the number of articles that we published in that year – is now 2.5, our highest to date.