Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences comes of age on the 20th anniversary of publication

A new year brings with it the nostalgic opportunity to look back on the previous year, a new outlook, and a promise of change. This editorial is a good chance to thank very intimatly all our colleagues, associate editors, and reviewers who have devoted time and effort to perform fair and constructive scientific evaluations. The editors look forward to the opportunity to stress problems, prospects, and strategies for success in the education and professional development of all Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences readers and welcome recommendations that can be addressed in future issues. IJBMS is one of the 24 scientific journals of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences (MUMS). The journal was launched in 1998 in Persian with English abstracts; it completed the transition to English full-text in 2008. It is a favorite of many researchers and has been free to all readers worldwide since its launch. The journal has been granted national and local awards several times previously. This editorial coincides with the yearly award of excellence for 2017 by MUMS for the third time. The quality of the journal has been recognized by the Thomson Reuters impact factor since it has climbed from below 0.5 to more than 1.4 in 2016 and has stayed above 1.4 ever since. One metric for judging impact is article citations. Judging by the number of cited papers and contribution of scientists from various fields, IJBMS has had both immediate impact and an enduring quality. Another judge of the impact of our material is the number of downloads. Over the period January–December 2017, a total of about 96000 articles were downloaded from the journal website. IJBMS is an active journal that receives an increasing flow of papers, but it is our continuing concern to adapt the journal to the evolution of science and to publish a better journal. Thanks to the competence of the editorial office and the efficiency of the publishers, we have reached a highly competitive publication time with an average of 3 months between the acceptance and the publication of articles. A variety of conditions have to be fulfilled for a journal to be successful. An essential one is the review process, which not only has to be rigorous and of high quality but also fast. The review process ultimately resulted in acceptance of 26% of the submitted manuscripts, which gives us a rejection rate of 74%. As the editorial team we are very grateful for the work done by the reviewers and highly appreciate their time spent on this vital activity. We recognize their valuable contribution to maintain high standards of our journal by listing their names at the end of last issues of 2017. Statistics for the year 2017 indicated that until December 1, 2017, a total of 1449 submissions were received, of which, 531 entered the peer review process, 373 (26%) were accepted and 1076 (74%) were rejected. The average review time has been 26 days. Authors have come from many parts of the globe, including the United States, China, Turkey, Australia, Finland, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom. There are a large variety of reasons why some manuscripts have a longer handling time than others. Obviously, not all reports come in on time since there are so many reasons why a reviewer cannot make his or her scheduled deadline. Often revisions are needed. However, papers that are written well and achieve a high score from the reviewers can be published within 1 month. At the time of writing, we have published 157 articles. Of these, 132 were original articles, 12 were systematic reviews, 10 were short communications, and 3 were other types of articles. One special issue was allocated to NLRCS International Congress Abstracts. IJBMS welcomes remarkable studies as original papers, general reviews, mini-reviews, systematic reviews,