50 years of Radiation and Environmental Biophysics: what were the hallmark papers?

You certainly have noticed that this year Radiation and Environmental Biophysics celebrates its 50-year anniversary (Rühm and Friedl 2013). This is a good opportunity to look back and identify those manuscripts in the journal that later turned out to be of scientific importance for the further developments in radiation research. Of course, the definition of hallmark papers is not as straightforward as it may appear at first glance, and different criteria may be used in that process. Each approach has its pros and cons. For example, citation rates can provide a hint on the acceptance a certain article has received in the scientific community. They depend, however, on the scientific field, and when we had a look in our citation records, we realized that most of the top-ranking papers were from a time when the emphasis of the journal was much more on biophysics than on radiation sciences. The number of full-text downloads from the REB website may be another indicator of importance, but may not adequately represent manuscripts that were published in the early phase of our journal. Furthermore, we did not want to shift all responsibility on to pure metrics. In the end, after considering all possible options, we decided to ask our Associate Editors and our Editorial Board members to identify those papers which THEY consider hallmark. Of course, more recent papers will come to mind more easily than older ones, and most scientists will not be very aware of papers that were published before their own active period. Because we believe, however, that our Associate Editors and Board members represent a fair cross-section over the scientific areas relevant for REB and because they show quite a representative mixture between younger and older scientists, we trust that their choice is a good representation of the journal’s highlights of the last 50 years. As indicated in Table 1, indeed the list of nominated papers covers almost the whole 50-year period, starting with Wachsmann and Jaschke (1963), at a time when the journal was still called Biophysik, and ending with Farkas et al. (2011). While a certain bias towards more recent papers is evident, there are quite some nominations from the last century (Fig. 1). Indeed, the paper most often nominated (5 times) was Kellerer and Chmelevsky (1975): Concepts of Microdosimetry. III. Mean values of the microdosimetric distribution. The list in Table 1 also reflects the traditional emphases of this journal: radio-ecology and dosimetry, risk estimation from epidemiological studies, radiobiology, and mechanistic modelling. And it reflects a long-lasting policy of openness towards scientists from countries where publishing in international journals is not always easy. A selection from the nominated papers is currently being made (again) available in a virtual anniversary issue of Radiation and Environmental Biophysics—thanks to our publisher house Springer who in this way wants to demonstrate appreciation of the successful 50-year story of REB. Fell free to visit our website, enjoy these historic papers, and even develop your own personal hallmark list. As Editors-in-Chief, we want to thank our Associate Editors and Members of the Editorial Board for their formidable work. We also want to thank our authors and readers without whom this journal would not live. A. A. Friedl (&) Department of Radiation Oncology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, 80336 Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected]