Foreword _ Probiotics and prebiotics _ important dietary components for health

They say that things occur in 'pig cycles' of 7 years. If that is true, if you would be superstitious, then we have just completed 7 very good years and are heading towards 7 worse years. Our Impact Factor (IF) has increased steadily over this first 7 year period from 1.474 in 2013 (IF over 2012), to 1.5 in 2014, to 2.647 in 2015, and then to 3.301 last year! Since the IF is one of the criteria used by researchers to select the journal they publish in, we have seen a steady increase in submissions reaching 237 manuscripts last year, which is a 21% increase compared to 2015 and a 32% increase compared to 2014. That is of course great news! It has led to the fact that we decided to publish 6 issues in 2015, rather than the usual 4, and 5 issues in 2016, to prevent that the waiting time between acceptance and appearance in hard-copy would be too long. However, since submissions have gone up and since the IF has gone up as well, we are more critical about which manuscripts we select for review, because we now have sufficient numbers of manuscripts and we still have to worry about a backlog. Last year, I predicted that the IF would decline, due to the fact that we are publishing more papers than in the years before, and that because of this we add more papers in the denominator of the formula for the calculation of the IF. But that would have meant that already last year the IF should have gone down, but instead it has gone up. I guess, that means that my abilities to predict the future are horrible. I wonder if there is a probiotic to improve that...