At the beginning of the New Year 2025, it is my pleasure to summarize the last year in Polish Archives of Internal Medicine (Pol Arch Intern Med) and share my thoughts on the future. In June 2024, we experienced mixed feelings following announcement of the 2023 impact factors. Similarly to many medical journals in the postpandemic time, the main metric of Pol Arch Intern Med has fallen from 4.8 to 3.8, and at the same time, quite surprisingly, we have entered the top quartile in (general) medicine (87th percentile). This proves that major changes, or precisely falls, took place in the whole category, moving down relative positions of several periodicals that grew in the years 2020–2022 while publishing the COVID‑19–related papers.

Let us look at Pol Arch Intern Med in numbers. In 2024, we published 11 issues and 258 articles, including 58 original papers, 22 reviews, 37 research letters, and 96 clinical images. The acceptance rate of manuscripts to be published was 29%, and the corresponding value for original studies was 7%. In 2024, the manuscript submissions rose to 748. Our average time from submission to the first reviews was 25 days, and from acceptance to online ahead‑of‑print publication only 7 days. Importantly, in 2024, the CC‑BY license, preferred by most funding agencies in Europe, became a standard for the papers published in Pol Arch Intern Med, which clearly demonstrates our support for open science.

Good news is the current estimation of our 2024 impact factor to be announced in June 2025. Based on our predictions, the 2024 impact factor should be around 4.5, which will be a huge success taking into account that the majority of citations in 2024 were generated by original papers submitted by Polish authors. In 2025, we will do our best to strive for another year of growth, especially in terms of the quality of papers published in Pol Arch Intern Med. We are working hard to maintain an upward trend and take our journal to new heights in 2025 and beyond.

We have a good team who are working very efficiently to move forward. Professors Grzegorz Gajos and Tomasz Stompór are responsible for the initial evaluation of manuscripts and the reviewing process. Much of the credit for the journal’s success can be attributed to their work. Our Managing Editor, Ms. Katarzyna Toffel, has also an important share in our achievements created every day at the editorial office.

In 2025, we intend to use our social media accounts more actively, and increase the number of our followers. As multimedia are essential for the authors to be able to communicate their research results effectively and in a manner that creates measurable impact, we would like to encourage all authors of clinical images to include multimedia as part of your submission. New tasks are ahead of our Social Media Editor, Professor Zbigniew Heleniak, as we intend to introduce increasingly popular Graphical Abstracts in original papers, which might enhance the visibility of Pol Arch Intern Med on social media.

I am confident that growing metrics, combined with our rigorous review process, will enhance the journal standing in the coming months. I am grateful to the authors, reviewers, editors, and all our readers for their invaluable contributions to Pol Arch Intern Med last year. We hope that the year 2025 will be fruitful, and we will be able to live up to the high standards that you have set and keep abreast of the changing times in publishing.

We wish you a healthy, prosperous, and successful New Year 2025.