At the end of this year, I wish to express my sincere gratitude, also on behalf of the other editors, the members of the editorial board and the publisher of the European Journal of Epidemiology, to the referees of the articles considered for the 2018 volume of EJE. It is no mean feat that hundreds of busy colleagues spend their time in assessing the more than 1100 manuscripts submitted each year to our Journal, in selecting the ones that may possibly be published, and in improving the quality of the selected articles. Many of the reviewers have helped us in the past years as well, and we are tremendously appreciative and grateful to them [1, 2]. It is largely thanks to them that EJE is doing well in attracting and publishing valuable contributions on epidemiologic research findings and epidemiologic methods.

Some time ago we have started to publish invited essays on topics of interest to epidemiologists and epidemiology [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. I would like to extend an invitation to our readers to submit essays, also without the prompting of an invite. Essays may cover general conceptual and methodologic issues [3, 12, 17, 23, 30, 31] or statistical and data-analytic topics [4, 5, 13, 22]. They may address current concerns [6, 8, 15, 16, 26, 29] or give historical perspectives [14, 19, 25]. The essays may also focus on topical issues in substantive epidemiology [7, 10, 11, 20, 21, 28] or voice societal concerns [7, 26]. We intend to leave the format of these pieces quite open and we hope to receive many creative and forceful contributions, from inside or out of the epidemiology box.

Adeline Abbe

Anders Ahlbom

Krasimira Aleksandrova

Silvia Alemany

André Amaral

Sarah Assaad

Anssi Auvinen

Mario Bauer

Sara Benitez Majano

Klaus Berger

Maarten Jacob Bijlsma

Paolo Boffetta

Carl Bonander

Hermann Brenner

Christian Brettschneider

Bert Brunekreef

Amanda Buttery

Ellen Caniglia

Lourdes Cantarero Arevalo

Pilar Carrasco-Garrido

Chen-Hsin Chen

Lori Chibnik

Tim Clayton

Ramon Cleries

Pierluigi Cocco

Helen Coleman

Anne Marie Colijn

Sirwan Darweesh

Adrian Davis

Inge de Kok

Emmely de Roos

Olaf Dekkers

Cecile Delcourt

Klodian Dhana

Mirko Di Martino

James Doidge

Helen Dolk

Mariola Drozd

Gustaf Edgren

Louise Emilsson

Simone Eussen

Esteve Fernandez

Bruno Ferreyro

Valentina Gallo

Xin Gao

Lu Gao

Gian Marco Ghiggeri

Marija Glisic

Stéphanie Goujon

Rebecca Graff

Sander Greenland

Rolf Groenwold

Nina Grootendorst

Pascal Guénel

Mats Hallgren

Gaël Paul Hammer

Richard Harbron

Jane Harding

Bernhard Haring

Emily Harrison

Saima Hilal

Albert Hofman

Martin Holzmann

Chung-Cheng Hsieh

José María Huerta

Arfan Ikram

Kamran Ikram

Carmen Jochem

Karl-Heinz Joeckel

Asa Johansson

Igor Karp

Maarit Kauppi

Maryam Kavousi

Nicole Kellow

Michelle Kelly-Irving

Nikhil Khankari

Brenda Kieboom

Marjolein Kooijman

Lewis Kuller

Oliver Kuß

Jeremy Labrecque

Nasser Laouali

Antti Latvala

Jack Leiss

Catherine Lesko

Silvan Licher

Longjian Liu

Magnus Løberg

Annemarie Luik

Angela Lupattelli

Yuan Ma

Ivana Malenica

Mohammad Ali Mansournia

Elizabeth Rose Mayeda

Richard McNally

Esther Molina

Scott Montgomery

Sabine Mous

Ryan Muetzel

Taulant Muka

Ellie Murray

Ashley Isaac Naimi

Tobias Niedermaier

Luke O’Connor

Jørn Olsen

Clive Osmond

Nicolas Pallet

Stefania Papatheodorou

Raphael Simon Peter

Andrea Piccinin

Elena Raffetti

Parminder Raina

Grégoire Rey

Jessica Rohmann

Matteo Rota

Susana Santos

Danja Sarink

Mary Schooling

Stephane Schuck

Matthias Schulze

Alexander Schuster

Lukas Schwingshackl

Sylvain Sebert

Ingmar Skoog

Andreas Stang

Denes Stefler

Henrik Stovring

Bruno Stricker

Tores Theorell

Liv Cecilie Vestrheim Thomsen

Antje Timmer

Ali Tiss

Esther Toes-Zoutendijk

Sergi Trias-Llimós

Pietro Trocchi

Konstantinos Tsilidis

Agnes van der Heide

André Verbeek

Sanne Verhoog

Ellis Voerman

Judith Vonk

Trudy Voortman

Heather Ward

Charlotte Warren-Gash

Yukari Watanabe

Reem Waziry

Erich Wichmann

Frank Wolters

James Yarmolinsky

Weimin Ye

Anna Zettergren

Qingying Zhang