The destiny of manuscripts submitted for publication in the Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology over the past 21 years.

Thi s note concludes the last issue of the 50 th volume of the Archives from an aspect that reveals the backstage of the journal. Manuscripts are blood of any journal and what the reader will find in the below figures are the results of a blood test. Thanks to the information era it was reasonably easy to analyse the flow of manuscripts through the Archives from 1979 to 1999 and see – through numbers, however little they tell us – the destiny of 870 manuscripts received from foreign and Croatian authors by 5 November 1999. There are a few pointers that give away the quality of a journal which the reader may wish to note. The first is the fluctuation of input that is best observed over a larger stretch of time. Figure 1 clearly shows that the Archives' input fluctuated considerably with the most prominent peaks occurring at a distance of approximately every four to six years. The reader may have already guessed that those peaks coincided with major congresses or other meetings in fields covered by the journal, which indeed considerably improved our »blood profile«. Such fluctuations, however, are hardly expected in top rating international scientific journals that, instead, have a steady and a heavy flow of manuscripts. In other words, Figure 1 rightly points out