Happy birthday: we are one year old

About a year ago we launched Systematic Reviews. During this first year we have been delighted by the journal’s growth and rate of development. At the time of writing we have published 84 articles. Of these, 42 were protocols, 17 were completed systematic reviews, 9 were methods papers, and 16 were other types of articles including two overviews. Twenty articles have been highly accessed, meaning that within a short period of time of being published they were frequently accessed, ranging from 2,000 to 9,000 times. Topics cover a wide spectrum of health issues, such as male participation in prevention programs of mother to child transmission of HIV; psychosocial interventions to reduce alcohol consumption; the use of intravascular ultrasound during bare-metal coronary stent insertion; to the effectiveness of certain antibiotics for preventing traveler’s diarrhea. We have also published a number of articles about evidence synthesis methods: a systematic review of guidelines for clinical trial protocol content, sample size and power consideration in network meta-analysis, and the evolution of approaches to rapid reviews. Corresponding authors have come from many parts of the globe, including Australia, Cameroon, Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Our launch issue included a series of nine articles about the importance of registering systematic reviews and the development of PROSPERO, an international prospective register of systematic reviews, and we are pleased to stream titles of latest protocols registered in PROSPERO on the journal home page. We are now indexed on Medline, PubMed, and Scopus and will apply to Thomson Reuters ISI for a journal impact factor (JIF) in the near future. Other relevant metrics, such as the number of accesses and citations, as well as an Altmetric score, can be found when accessing any journal article. Based on data from the journal’s website the journal is gaining momentum and attracting interest from readers.