I was appointed at the latest JSID Board of Directors Meeting as the new Editor-in-Chief starting January 1998, since Professor Yoshikawa will complete his term by the end of this year. Thanks to the great efforts made by the past two Editors-in-Chief, the founding Editor-in-Chief. Professor Ogawa who is now Chairman of Board of Directors, JSID, and his successor, Professor Yoshikawa, now Vice Chairman of JSID, JDS has grown steadily as an international journal which is now covered by Index Medicus, Current Contents and Citation Indes. My job is to expand the journal both qualitatively and quantitatively by accepting and publishing internationally sophisticated articles promptly and timely. This is why I should ask all contributors, many reviewers, my Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members and the Publisher to give me fruitful supports for the coming five years. Let me briefly introduce myself. I was born in 1951 at the foot of Mt. Fuji, studied at Kyoto University Medical School and finished my post-doctoral fellowship at the Rheumatology Department, University of Minnesota. Mya research interests include cutaneous allergic inflammation, photobiology as well as cutaneous aging. I returned to Kyoto University from Gunma University in June 1998. This is why my editorial office moved to Kyoto. I'll do my best to make the journal more global and powerful sending the world-wide message of cutaneous biology as a scientific breeze of the news era. I greatly appreciate your help in advance and please allow me to make every effort to get the goal. 

Lately we have received many questions about the Journal of Dermatological Science and its impact factor. I would hereby like to take the opportunity to explain why the impact facor of the Journal of Dermatological Science is not yet published. The 1985 impact factor of Journal X would be calculated as follows: the number of times 1983 and 1984 source items in Journal X were cited in 1985 divided by the total number of source articles published in Journal X in 1983 and 1984. So it takes two years of inclusion in the system before the impact factor can be calculated. Since the Journal of Dermatological Science has been accepted in 1995 for inclusion in SciSearch, Research Alert, and Current Contents/Clinical Medicine with Volume 9, issue 1 (it will be listed in the category "Dermatology and Venereal Diseases), the journal will have a 1997 impact factor. However, the 1997 Journal Citation Reports are not released until autumn of 1998. So the first impact factor of the Journal of Dermatological Science will be published this coming autumn. 

I hope this explanation answers your questions upon the impact factor of the Journal of Dermatological Science, and I trust that you, as readers and authors, will bear in mind that you can influence the impact factor. The higher the quality of submitted articles, the higher it's impact factor will be!