Although the Swiss Society of Cardiology has existed for 50 years, it had no official organ until the board of the society, under the then visionary leaderships of Matthias Pfisterer and followed by Bernhard Meier,decided to approve a proposal of Thomas F. Lüscher to launch its own journal. Under a joint German and French name, “Kardiovaskuläre Medizin / Médecine cardiovasculaire”, the official journal of the Swiss Society of Cardiology came into existence and published its first issue in 1998.
The journal was run by two main editors, René Lerch and Thomas F. Lüscher, representing the French- and German-speaking regions of Switzerland respectively, supported by a number of Swiss associate editors and a national editorial board. Since then the journal has published 11 issues a year and a supplement with the abstracts from the Swiss Society of Cardiology annual meeting. It is financed by advertising and hence supplied free to its readers by the publisher EMH Schwabe & Co. Basel. Its circulation is large (over 7400 copies) and has helped to make the journal a success.
The support of sister societies such as the Swiss Society of Angiology, the Swiss Society of Hypertension, the Swiss Society of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery and the Swiss Society of Paediatric Cardiology, has been important in furthering our ambition to make this a true cardiovascular journal encompassing all fields relevant to the mechanisms, diagnosis and management of diseases of the heart and blood vessels.
The main focus of the journal has been, and remains, education. Hence review articles of papers presented to the annual meeting of the Swiss Society of Cardiology, invited articles and articles submitted by individual authors are published, as are case reports and the series “Images in Cardiovascular Medicine” and “The Interesting ECG” contributed by competent section editors from all parts of the country. In addition, an increasing number of original articles have been published in recent years. Articles from international cardiologists and researchers acquired at the annual meeting of the Swiss Society of Cardiology have started to give “Kardiovaskuläre Medizin / Médecine cardiovasculaire” an international flavour.
This set the stage for an application for a Medline entry. After an unsuccessful first attempt, we implemented systematically and meticulously those items the committee felt were missing, while correcting those criticised during this review process. Specifically, we invited prominent international opinion leaders to become members of the editorial board, made conflict of interest statements mandatory, implemented a vigorous peer-review system now supported by an electronic platform (Editorial Manager:
www.cardiovascmed.ch – online submission), removed advertisements from the front page and focused our efforts on increasing the number of original research articles. The change of name to “Cardiovascular Medicine” was only the last step in this process.
Fortunately, this apparently obvious name was still available for our use. “Cardiovascular Medicine” is also a programme, indicating that in the years to come we shall be publishing more articles in English, a language not considered quintessentially Swiss but today understood and mastered effectively by most of us. Indeed, the majority of Swiss, whether we like it or not, are today more competent in English than in any other of our country’s second languages, particularly on medical issues. Thus, it seems appropriate to change the name of our official journal accordingly and to make this a programme for the future. Since this initiative was approved by the president of our society, Christian Seiler, along with those of our sister societies, we are happy to announce that we shall put this programme into practice in the current issue of our journal. Let us now keep our fingers crossed for the success of our next attempt to enter the Pubmed system. The editors of the journal are convinced that as “Cardiovascular Medicine” we shall sail into a successful future, confident that we can count on the support of our members, editorial board members, authors and reviewers.
