BMC Public Health reaches 1000th article

BMC Public Health has the honor of publishing its 1,000th article. BMC Public Health is the first medical journal in the BMC-series to reach this symbolic milestone, following in the footsteps of BMC Bioinformatics in 2006 and BMC Genomics last year. The 1,000th article, "Does economic development contribute to sex differences in ischaemic heart disease mortality? Hong Kong as a natural experiment using a case-control study" by Prof Gabriel Leung and his colleagues from the University of Hong Kong offers the suggestion that the excess risk of heart disease among men in developed countries may be determined during puberty.

We’d like to thank Prof Leung for his support of BMC Public Health, both as an author and as a frequent peer reviewer for the series. We would also like to take this opportunity to say our thanks to all the authors who have submitted to the journal over the years, to our editorial board and to our peer reviewers for their time, effort and expertise.

We would also like to thank our readers, of whom hundreds of thousands have accessed our top ten most viewed articles over the last seven years. More than 28,000 readers have viewed our most accessed article, which examines bacterial contamination of water purification systems, a particular concern in hospital settings. The most viewed articles also include work with the striking result that even occasional passive smoking increases the chance of developing acute heart problems by over 25%. In addition to that study on passive smoking, BMC Public Health has been an important contributor to the debate around the banning of smoking in the public places, which finally came into force in England and Wales last year.

We have broken many national and international news stories, including the finding that South Asians living in Scotland are significantly more likely to suffer a heart attack than the rest of the Scottish population, which was covered by the BBC, and the worrying news that the half of the health workers polled in the US were planning to stay at home if there is a flu pandemic, which received worldwide coverage including in USA Today, the BBC, the Daily Mail and the Jerusalem Post. Open access means that everyone reading these stories in the media was able to read the original research immediately and for no charge.

The impact of the work published by BMC Public Health is reflected by its ranking by SCImago in the top quarter of public health journals and by the fact that its articles have been cited nearly 2,500 times.

If you are a researcher in epidemiology or public health medicine, we’d like to invite you to submit your next research article to the journal. And if you would like to be more involved in BMC Public Health, please contact me.

Annabel Phillips, PhD
In-house Editor
BMC Public Health

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