Join us in celebrating Echo Research & Practice' 10th year of publishing ground-breaking and leading research in the field of Echocardiography.
Read below for a brief editorial piece kindly authored by co-Founding Editor-in-Chief, Petros Nihoyannopoulos, discussing the journal's contribution to the field of Echocardiography over the past 10 years, and the importance of this research in the development of effective diagnosis, management and treatment measures for cardiac conditions.
Echo Research & Practice: 10th Anniversary
The Journal Echo Research and Practice is a major peer reviewed journal under the responsibility of the British Society of Echocardiography (BSE) and published by Springer Nature's BioMed Central (BMC). It was established to provide a world-class, unique, open-source platform for original research in echocardiography, critical reviews and selected case reports with the view of providing an avenue for communication of scientific data, diagnostic developments and teaching to the members of the BSE and wider echocardiography community. The journal was launched in 2014 as the official Journal of the British Society of Echocardiography.
I had the honour to be appointed as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal together with the late Prof Mark J Monaghan as Co-Editor. Our proposal was to expand the Journal world-wide with the support of a well known national and international Editorial Board, including several key international opinion leaders on echocardiography. The aim of the journal was to publish original research, Guidelines & Recommendation from the BSE, case reports, review articles by key national and international key opinion leaders and editorials. After many years of hard work from the editors and the entire editorial board, we were eventually able to obtain an Impact Factor in June 2023 of 6.3!
Echocardiography today encompasses several evolving modalities that are now crucial to patients’ clinical management. Echocardiography is by far the most widely used cardiac imaging modality and one of the few with continuous development despite its long history. It is virtually inconceivable today that patients with known or suspected heart disease will not have at least one echocardiographic examination. The non-invasive nature and total lack of radiation establishes echocardiography as the first line imaging modality for the majority of cardiac pathologies. In the 10 years that ERP has been publishing, echocardiography has expanded dramatically from routine acquisition of amazing three-dimensional images of cardiac structures to pocket-size machines that may be used in all clinical settings. Doppler techniques offer a comprehensive haemodynamic assessment of cardiac physiology, while Transoesophageal imaging of the heart valves is now essential for critical decision making and during cardiac interventions. Deformation imaging of the cardiac muscle has opened new horizons of cardiac physiology and contraction patterns in various cardiac conditions, while contrast echocardiography not only optimizes endocardial definition but also enables imaging of myocardial perfusion. With all of these developments, echocardiography has become a multimodality imaging technique in its own right and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In contrast to all other imaging modalities, Echocardiography is a unique clinical tool that provides a real-time investigation of cardiac structure and function at the bed side.
Echo Research & Practice is the only European echocardiography journal that is supported by a national society with a sole focus on echocardiography. While there are other multi-modality cardiovascular imaging journals, echocardiography is unfortunately poorly represented within these. The need for a dedicated European echocardiography journal with a world-wide reach was clear and has been the driving-force for Echo Research & Practice for the last 10 years.