Preface

Since I wrote my last Preface entitled Some Food For Thought, the financial situation in the United States and much of the rest of the world has deteriorated significantly and governments here and elsewhere are introducing or threatening to introduce drastic cuts that may well adversely affect government-supported health care programs. In this regard, the Perspective in the August 18th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by Victor Fuchs entitled The Doctor's Dilemma—What Is “Appropriate” Care? is very interesting and well worth reading.1 In it he discusses the difficulty for physicians and for governments and the public to decide what “ethical” care and what “appropriate” care are. The dilemma is between the physician's age-old responsibility to provide the best possible care for the individual patient and the need to provide patient care based on the wise and cost-effective management of financially-limited clinical resources. Turning to more mundane issues related to Hemodialysis International, 2010 was the first year the journal could be given an impact factor by Thomson ISI in its Journal Citation Reports® (JCR®). This volume offers a systematic, objective means to critically evaluate the world's leading journals, using quantifiable, statistical information based on citation data. By compiling articles' cited references, JCR helps to measure research influence and impact at the journal and category levels, and shows the relationship between citing and cited journals, providing the context to understand a journal's true place in the world of scholarly literature. Hemodialysis International came in with a 2010 score of 1.093. This ranked it 3123rd out of 8005 journals in the medical field, 55th out of 69 journals in the “Urology and Nephrology” subject category, and if restricted to nephrology-related journals it was 29th out of 35. Our first-ever impact factor (although a higher number would have been a cause to celebrate) has to be viewed in the right context. Our journal is slowly evolving and we shall have better idea of how we are doing after another couple of years. Remember, we are a niche journal restricted to hemodialysis-related papers and publishing quarterly, and are in competition with the big monthly journals like Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Kidney International, the American Journal of Kidney Disease, the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, and Nephrology, Dialysis and Transplantation, that have an all-encompassing scope, have an international reputation developed over many years and are published by long-established large organizations. Our score is close to those of Contributions to Nephrology, Nephrology, and Therapeutic Apheresis and Dialysis, and better than Clinical Nephrology, Renal Failure, Dialysis and Transplantation and several foreign journals. Peritoneal Dialysis International has had an impact factor for a number of years running and in 2008 it was 1.477. Some of you will remember that this journal started out as Home Hemodialysis International in 1997 and transitioned to become Hemodialysis International in 2003. The papers from the original journal are not listed on PubMed, although the ISHD will see if this can be arranged. However, if you want to see any of the papers from Home HDI they now are available on the ISHD website—http://www.ishd.net/ This issue also includes a couple of papers about the invaluable legacy of Russell Palmer, a nephrologist from Vancouver, British Columbia, who is unfortunately now largely forgotten. In 1947, he was the first in North America to have a patient recover following hemodialysis for acute renal failure with a Kolff rotating drum dialyzer that he had built from blueprints given him by Dr Kolff. (Mount Sinai Hospital in New York started their dialysis program in 1946, but did not have a patient recover until shortly after Palmer.) He was also the first to treat a patient with home peritoneal dialysis in North America in 1963, a few months before Fred Boen in Seattle. Please make a note that the 5th Congress of the International Society for Hemodialysis will be held at the Grand Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan from August 3rd to August 5th, 2012. This issue contains a letter of invitation from Professor Dr Hung-Chung Chen, the President of the Taiwan Society of Nephrology. Starting with the 2012 calendar year, interested individuals have the opportunity to receive a subscription to Hemodialysis International by becoming a member of the International Society for Hemodialysis (ISHD). Annual membership dues have been less than the price of a non-member individual subscription to the journal and came with additional society benefits. Now, all individual subscription categories not associated with society membership will be discontinued at the end of 2011. Those of our readers who receive the journal as non-member subscribers are encouraged to continue their subscriptions to the journal by becoming society members and taking advantage of the reduced cost and added member services. To learn more about the ISHD, please visit http://www.ishd.net and click on “Join ISHD now” for current member subscription information and rates. Christopher R. Blagg Editor-in-Chief

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