The year 2025 draws to its close. It has been a good time for Polish Archives of Internal Medicine (Pol Arch Intern Med). Despite the fact that many medical journals dropped in their impact factor (IF), as compared with the previous year, our journal has experienced a marked rise to 4.7 in 2025, which represents a tremendous achievement. This value reflects the continued hard work and dedication of 2 editors, our authors, reviewers, a publisher. Pol Arch Intern Med made a remarkable improvement in its overall ranking, and the predicted IF for 2025 is 4.8, which indicates that we are likely to maintain our standing among the top‑quartile journals in the category of general medicine. The growing interest in the content published in Pol Arch Intern Med is also expressed by a 20%-increase in the submission rate.

We harbor bold ambitions to grow and thrive further, with the goal of reaching IF above 5.0 in highly competitive and evolving publishing market.

In 2025, several changes have been introduced in our journal. Since March 2025, Pol Arch Intern Med requires the submission of a graphical abstract along with the manuscript. A visual summary presenting a study’s design, major findings, and potential implications has become increasingly popular in medical journals as a way to enhance science communication, especially on social media platforms. As most authors are not trained in how to develop graphical abstracts, and combining pictures or Figures with words to convey a clear message has turned out challenging, the abstracts were quite heterogenous within the first few months. In January 2026, a new instruction for authors will be launched, with the aim of ensuring a standard organization and content presentation in the graphical abstracts to optimize their readability and comprehension of the research outcomes.

In July 2025, the artificial intelligence (AI) declaration has become an obligatory part of each submission to Pol Arch Intern Med. The broad availability of commercial services (eg, ChatGPT) has led to threats for the concept of the authorship, the risk of plagiarism, AI hallucinations, and inaccurate or fabricated references, and such cases have also been detected in our journal. As most scientific journals, Pol Arch Intern Med has addressed the issue of the generative AI use while writing a manuscript by introducing the AI‑related declaration, with the intention of modifying our strategy in the coming months, as we expect more sophisticated AI tools, and hopefully more efficient systems for their detection. Following the first 6 months of the AI regulations, it is clear that the AI tools are infrequently declared in our papers (in 7% of the articles published).

In 2026, a new more attractive website will be released to facilitate, among others, access to recent Pol Arch Intern Med content and online full‑text article view, based on the latest trends. To shape the site, we have had the support of an experienced e‑team of our publisher, and asked for the advice of our editors (with a huge contribution of Dr. Anna Imiela, MD, PhD, our Social Media Editor appointed in 2025) and members of our Scientific Board. The final aim of this initiative, supported by our social media profiles, is to reach more physicians and researchers in Poland and abroad interested in the latest advances in internal medicine and its subspecialties. We hope that the results will fulfill these expectations.

It has been a true privilege to work with all of our co‑workers to develop our journal, make it thrive and, ultimately, provide a high‑quality and useful professional resource to you, our readers. We would like to express our gratitude to Pol Arch Intern Med’s reviewers for their expert support of the journal.

To all of you, Merry Christmas and a happy, successful, and peaceful New Year 2026.