It is a great honor and privilege for me to be appointed the editor-in-chief of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, following my service as the section editor of abdominal radiology for 6 years. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the members of the Board of Directors of the Turkish Society of Radiology.

Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology is a highly reputable scientific journal in our field and distinguished itself with its high scientific and quality standards. The key factor for this distinction is the careful evaluation process of the submitted articles. Applying the highest scientific and ethical standards is elemental in every step of this process, ensuring the maintenance of the high quality of our journal. Our priorities in the upcoming editorial period are to at least preserve and possibly improve the best practices pertaining to the scientific and stylistic evaluation of the submitted manuscripts, closely follow the innovations in the field of radiology, and further our publication standards.

The impact factor of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology is 3.132 for the last five years, 3.346 for 2021 and an estimated 2.43 for 2022. The Scopus Cite Scores of our journal in 2021 and 2022 are 3.9 and 3.8, respectively. Although variable JCI scores are recorded, the rank of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology among 200 journals in “Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Medical Imaging” is 85 (70/136 among SCI-Expanded journals) (Table 1). Despite an abundance of manuscript submissions to all scientific journals during COVID-19 pandemic, evaluation processes were generally expedited, leading to a steep rise in the impact factor of many journals, including ours.¹ However, during the current normalization period which ensued the heyday of the pandemic, a decrease is expected with regard to the impact factor of our journal. Since we have a large backlog of accepted manuscripts that are pending publication, maintaining–let alone improving–our impact factor will be quite challenging. As of December 2022, there were around 80 accepted articles waiting to be published in our journal. This translated into a significant gap between the number of accepted and published manuscripts (Table 2). The first thing that we did following the most recent reshaping of our editorial board was to publish all these articles online in the first week of January 2023. We aspire to work hard for improving and streamlining this process of publishing already accepted articles as we move further along the way.

I would like to share several important changes that have been recently implemented in our journal as well as our future projections: first, the editorial board of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology has been extensively changed in accordance with our societal bylaws with the addition of new colleagues who are, as have been the ones they have replaced, all reputable experts in their subspecialties. Second, an article publication fee has been started to be charged for articles accepted to be published in Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology as of October 2022. Details of this newly implemented policy are available in the author instruction section of our journal’s website. Open-access peer-review policy of the journal will be continued. Third, we are working on changes in the article submission and reviewing system of our journal which will facilitate the submission process of manuscripts and will allow reviewers to evaluate the manuscripts in a more efficient way. These changes will be implemented into our system in a short period of time. With these changes, submission of manuscripts will be easier and publication of accepted manuscripts will be faster. The editorial board of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology will be more than happy to hear opinions, suggestions and criticisms about the journal’s publication policy, article evaluation and publishing processes from all our readers.

In conclusion, I would like to thank all our previous chief editors and section editors as well as all our colleagues who have generously donated their time as reviewers, as well as all the authors who contributed with their scientific papers to our journal. Now is the time to work together to further improve the hard-earned reputation of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology in the field of radiology.