The last year 2023 was exceptional. We celebrated 100 years of existence of Polish Archives of Internal Medicine (Pol Arch Intern Med). Survival of the journal in a highly competitive scholarly publishing market, despite the World War II and communist times, deserves recognition. Research with the adjective Polish (even if in the English version of its name), on a wide spectrum of diseases, conducted and reported largely by Polish clinicians, still attracts interest and attention of investigators from around the world who cite the articles from our journal, as best reflected by its latest impact factor of 4.8. This denotes that Pol Arch Intern Med is the best Polish scientific clinical journal and proves that the Polish Society of Internal Medicine that owns our journal from the very beginning is in the game. For 100 years, dedication and excellence of editors, reviewers, technical staff, and especially authors of scientific articles enabled continuous market presence of our journal even when faced with various, sometimes controversial changes (on-line only access, article processing charges, rigorous evaluation of statistics and the English language, etc.). We are especially proud of the fact that a considerable part of our content aims to update our readership on recent clinically relevant advances in internal medicine, and helps them manage real-life patients not only in Poland. Over 100 years, the journal’s mission has not changed. Pol Arch Intern Med serves practicing internists by providing high-quality, vetted scientific information to improve patient outcomes. We rely upon the members of our Society and internists interested in clinical or translational research to send us their best and most impactful work, to provide our readers with access to the latest research as soon as possible following acceptance for publication.

An issue of concern for both the editors and the authors has been a delay between acceptance of a paper and its appearance online, which is due to careful checking of each paper before making it available to the readers. As of the beginning of 2024, we have decided to publish all papers online immediately following their acceptance, so as to make them available at the earliest opportunity in this fast-moving field of medical research. We are confident that this, together with measures to increase our throughput, will ensure timely publication of submissions in the future.

At the beginning of 2024, we need to face the fact that a new impact factor, based on our estimations, is likely to be lower than that of 2023. The 2-year impact factor value below 4.0 means we need to assume greater responsibility and increase our efforts to improve quality as the only way to enhance our standing. We are aware that the probable significant reduction in bibliometric parameters to be announced in June 2024 can only partially be explained by a loss of highly-cited original works from 2020 related to COVID-19.

It is time to resolve to continue good practices and correct errors in order to render publishing in Pol Arch Intern Med more impactful. It is time to declare a New Year’s resolution. I am determined to enhance our standing by more rigorous evaluation of the submitted materials. Quality improvement should be pursued continuously, and therefore we set up goals to be achieved. The year 2024 will bring new challenges, but we look at them as opportunities to change.

We have decided to introduce a new section, called “Latest trends”, which aims to share new advances in clinically relevant fields that fuel debates on hot and controversial topics still uncovered by guidelines or position papers. We hope for a positive feedback for this initiative put forward by Professor Andrzej Januszewicz.

Other changes we have recently implemented were introducing our reference style to Zotero Style Repository and adding ORCID identifiers. Our reference style is now available for Zotero and other reference managers. Authors can find Citation Style Language file for our journal on Zotero Style Repository or download it directly from our website. The ORCID identifiers should greatly facilitate identification of authors and their scientific publications.

We thank our authors and readers for their continued support of Pol Arch Intern Med through submissions and citations. Special thanks go to the Associate Editors, Professor Grzegorz Gajos and Professor Tomasz Stompór, along with Ms. Katarzyna Toffel, our managing editor.

We promise to continue our efforts this year to provide specialists in internal medicine and other fields with original studies, which we hope would enrich our understanding of various diseases and improve clinical care we offer to our patients.