New JBI emphasis on translational bioinformatics

With the current issue, the Journal of Biomedical Informatics is now well into its ninth year since its 2001 transformation from the former Computers and Biomedical Research. We are delighted with the growth of the journal during that time and believe that we have established precisely the kind of unique niche that we sought to pursue when we renamed the journal and developed its current editorial policy and international scope. JBI has sought to complement, rather than compete with, other top journals in biomedical informatics. In particular, we have sought to focus on articles that introduce new methods or techniques that are of interest to the biomedical informatics research community, directing papers elsewhere if they deal primarily with domain-specific applications, evaluations, or surveys. There are other venues for publishing results of applications that have utilized informatics approaches, but no other journal that focuses solely on the scientific and methodological base of the informatics field, with biomedical applications viewed primarily as proof of concept or as the motivating basis for a new informatics innovation. Those who have followed the journal these past nine years will note that it has grown substantially in size. We are receiving larger numbers of submissions each year but have maintained our acceptance rate (at about 25–30%), so the number of pages has increased even while we have, we believe, assured the kind of rigor and quality for which we have sought to be known. Fewer papers are now being rejected without review, based on a submission being poorly matched with our editorial policy. We believe this means that the community is more aware of what we are looking for and is less frequently sending us poorly matched papers. Our methodological review papers continue to be among the most cited (and downloaded) elements in the journal, and we have sought to have at least one in each issue. We would love to receive more contributions in this category and urge our readers to consider putting together methodological review papers on a topic for which the informatics community would value a tutorial overview. We view the application domains for biomedical informatics research very broadly and have been encouraging submissions related to all four areas of motivating applications: bioinformatics, imaging (structural) informatics, clinical informatics, and public health informatics. The first of these areas, bioinformatics, has accounted for an increasing number of submissions and you will find in JBI a …