Dear colleagues,

I am honoured to assume the responsibilities of Editor-in-Chief of Internal and Emergency Medicine from Professor Gian Franco Gensini who, for over 3 years, has been the driving force behind the growth of the journal.

I wish to thank the President of the Italian Society of Internal Medicine (SIMI) Professor Giuseppe Licata and all the members of SIMI Council for providing me this opportunity.

I have had the pleasure of serving as Chairman of the Operative Group since 2006 until now. During this time Gian Franco has been an excellent organizer, building the success of the journal. I thank him for his support, and I communicate to all of you that he will continue to offer his expertise and leadership to the journal.

A special thanks to Peter Rosen, for his relevant role, together with the other friends of the Emergency Section of the Journal. In consideration of his invaluable job done from 2006 I have decided to ask Peter to act as senior associate editor devoted to Emergency Medicine.

I wish to thank also the management of Springer for its past and future cooperation and all the members of the Editorial Board for their continued dedication to the growth of the journal.

Among the novelties, a new section named Medical Illustration, is starting, based on the input of Peter Rosen. I hope you will enjoy it.

Thanks to the Editorial Manager software used by Springer, the submission and review process is entirely online. Soon after the online submission of a paper to the website some potential reviewers are contacted. I thank all reviewers for their work for the journal. Still I have to note that potential reviewers sometimes take a long time simply to acknowledge the message inviting them to do a review, and after agreeing to do a review they sometimes take a long time to provide it; sometimes they never do so. Most delays arise from these sources and we hope to improve, with your help, these critical points.

I have the pleasure to tell you that during the first 5 months of 2009 we have received over 110 submissions, which further demonstrate the success of the journal.

Finally, I wish to remind you that the author instructions have been changed and authors are kindly invited to prepare their manuscripts strictly following the instructions on the journal website.

With fresh enthusiasm and excellent technical support from Springer, I hope that our journal will continue to flourish and to expand in scope and depth, attracting more and more authors both from the traditional and emerging research fields of Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine. With the cooperation of the Editorial Boards and all of you, I do hope that the journal quality and recognition will further improve.

I am sure you will join me in my goal of continuing to work to make Internal and Emergency Medicine a great international journal.