AHA announces editor designee for stroke

The American Heart Association is pleased to announce that Vladimir Hachinski, MD, will become the new Editor-inChief of Stroke beginning on July 1, 2000. Mark L. Dyken, MD, and his editorial staff will continue to process manuscripts that are submitted before July 1, but Dr Hachinski will direct the review of all new manuscripts submitted after that date. Dr Hachinski is the Richard and Beryl Ivey Professor and Chair of the Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences at the University of Western Ontario. He is a world-renowned expert in the field of stroke and was the first to coin the term “brain attack” in 1974. He has served on numerous editorial boards, including Stroke since 1982. Dr Hachinski will be stepping down from his Chair in order to devote his full energies to the editorship of Stroke. We are delighted that he has agreed to do so and usher the journal into the new millennium. Dr Hachinski will take over the reins from Dr Dyken who, at nearly 9 years, has had the longest tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Stroke. The journal has had tremendous growth under Dr Dyken’s direction. One of Dr Dyken’s innovations was to add two editors, Dr Marie-Germaine Bousser as Foreign Clinical Associate Editor and Dr Hermes A. Kontos as Basic Science Associate Editor. He also introduced a policy of “double blinding” for manuscript reviews. Stroke has seen an enormous increase in submissions since Dr Dyken assumed the editorship, from 553 in 1991 to approximately 1400 in 1999. Despite the increase in submissions, the time between submission to first decision has decreased to less than 5 weeks, thanks to more than 875 participating reviewers. The importance of Stroke in the field is reflected by the increase in the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Impact Factor, which went from 2.9 before 1992 to 4.3 by 1997. We thank Dr Dyken for his immense effort and accomplishments during his tenure and warmly welcome Dr Hachinski as the new Editor-in-Chief of Stroke.