New initiatives from EJHG, ESHG and Nature Publishing Group

The tighter integration of the European Journal of Human Genetics into the Nature Publishing Group begins to bear fruit. The restyled Nature.com website, launched in May 2002, sports subject area pages – eg, genetics, medical research, immunology and neurosciences, to name the more relevant to our coverage – containing weekly ‘update’ sections. These sections highlight new articles published anywhere across NPG's publications portfolio. Since then, NPG's new Executive Editor for EJHG, Nick Campbell, has been actively screening EJHG issues to flag matters of wider interest for highlighting. As a consequence, thus far, almost every month EJHG papers have been highlighted on the Nature.com pages. Topics highlighted range from centenarian research,¹ the Usher3 gene,² night blindness³ and a serum bilirubin genome scan for anti-atherogeneic effects,⁴ indicating the broad scope of the EJHG. Clearly, the chance to make it to these pages presents a new and significant incentive to submit your science to the EJHG.

In parallel, to further boost your interest, the ESHG and NPG will start to monitor and reward very high-impact EJHG publications. We will keep a tab on the yearly citations of research published in EJHG during the preceding year. The first authors of the top three papers will get a one-year free ESHG membership, including online and hardcopy EJHG subscription. In addition, the first author of the number one paper will receive a modest financial prize. These awards will be presented to the winners at the annual ESHG meeting. For this purpose, as an additional bonus, their registration fee to this meeting will be waived.

To make a flying start, we present here the top three papers of 2000, cited in 2001, whose authors will be honoured together with the 2002 winners, at next years' ESHG meeting in Birmingham. The top scorers are: Gasparini et al,⁵ on the high frequency of the 35delG GJB2 mutation in DFNB1 deafness (19 citations); Dobson-Stone et al,⁶ pitting fluorescent SSCP against DHPLC (17 citations, showing that technology papers can be highly cited, too); and Schiller et al,⁷ describing phenotypic variation and genetic heterogeneity in Leri-Weill Syndrome (also 17 citations).

Our congratulations to these authors, and also our thanks, as they contribute significantly to the impact of the EJHG. With the above incentives we aim to increase the numbers of high impact papers such as these in the coming years. While doing this, we also aim to match our scope to the expanding breadth of human genetics. To this effect we have altered our subtitle into ‘International coverage of all aspects of human genetics’. We have also highlighted a few new specific categories in which we welcome your contributions: Medical genomics, Statistical and computational genetics and Bioinformatics.