A review of 2004, and with the new year comes a new look

2004 was a great year for Critical Care. Our impact factor increased to 1.9, making us the sixth highest ranking intensive/critical care journal. The ranking that is compiled by Thompson ISI [1] showed that Critical Care had the second largest growth in the field. A research article by Rinaldo Bellomo and colleagues [2] published in May 2004 broke all of our previous ‘most accessed’ records, charting over 14,000 accesses (this unprecedented visibility was made possible by the article being Open Access [3,4]). Furthermore, our research submissions have increased by 57%. We also celebrated our 3000th published article (the 13th in the Statistics Review series, covering receiver operating characteristic curves [5]); our initial decision time for manuscripts is now 32 days, which we have reduced from 43 days in 2003; and the number of people registered on the website broke the 21,000 mark.