The purpose of the Topic Highlight column is to collect related articles that focus on a defined topic; in essence, the articles covered in this column are reviews, each citing an average of more than 100 references.
Each Topic Highlight is an invited submission, and we invite only internationally influential experts to write these articles. We identify these experts from the pool of authors with highly-cited publications; specifically, these are authors whose numbers of citations represent the top 1% over the past 10 years. Such a high number of citations can directly reflect the quality of the authored paper and the academic influence of the author.
Generally, we arrange an initial evaluation for the titles of submitted Topic Highlight articles. Those articles whose titles are acceptable then must undergo rigorous peer review. The accepted articles are published free of charge and under the open access model, so that readers have free access to these articles. The Topic Highlight articles are very popular with readers; as such, as part of our celebration of the 20th anniversary of the World Journal of Gastroenterology (WJG), we organized 22 Topic Highlight topics (e.g., Hepatitis C Virus) and invited internationally influential experts to contribute relevant articles. A total of 806 Topic Highlights were ultimately accepted, among which 16 focused on Hepatitis C Virus and Pancreatic Cancer were published in the 32nd issue of the 20th volume of the WJG (http://www.wjgnet.com/1007-9327/journal/v20/i32/index.htm).
The publisher of the WJG, the Baishideng Publishing Group, has worked diligently over the past decade to promote transparency and integrity in science communication and conduct. Again, our intent in publishing the Topic Highlight column is to provide the science and medicine communities across the globe with comprehensive reviews of defined topics that are relevant to current clinical practice and research; we do not use the Topic Highlights to artificially raise the journal’s impact factor by inviting editorial board members to contribute articles.
Our approach of inviting only internationally influential experts to contribute high-quality review articles or original articles allows us to provide a worldwide readership audience with high-quality contents. This is our company's culture and spirit.
(By Lian-Sheng Ma, President and Company Editor-in-Chief, and Jin-Lei Wang, Director, October 13, 2014)