This year 263 contributions were submitted for the GMDS Annual Meeting, including four full papers for the MIBE and 69 for a publication in the GMDS series in Studies in Health Technologies and Informatics, as well as 192 abstracts. All submissions were reviewed in a two-stage peer review process. A total of 760, in some cases very extensive, reviews were carried out by 280 experts. In a meta-review, the preliminary results were communicated to the authors with information on the revision of the contributions. After the revision, a second, shortened metareview took place. A total of one contribution to publication in MIBE and 38 contributions to publication in the GMDS Series was accepted. A detailed presentation of the results of the peer review process is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Illustration of the contributions submitted and the results of the peer review process, broken down by the various types of publication.

We would like to thank all authors for submitting the mostly very good contributions. We would especially like to thank all the reviewers: With their work and the sometimes very detailed reviews and critical-constructive references they have made a significant contribution to the quality of these proceedings. All reviewers are listed at the end of the prefaces.

This year, for the first time, the review procedure was carried out in accordance with the new publication regulations. This required and requires various changes in the “Online Registry” submission system. We know what it means to integrate changes into running software systems and would like to thank webtek.at and especially Mr. Thomas and Claus Schabetsberger for their support. The changes in the review process also led to disruptions and confusion at various points. We apologize to the authors and reviewers for any inconvenience.

Last but not least: We would like to pick up on the President’s greeting that submissions of full paper for the GMDS annual meeting are now a tradition: We see this as a mission to preserve and expand on what we have achieved. In the last two years 80 full papers were published in the GMDS proceedings by IOS Press, which were cited 44 times (0.55 per item). [Source Clarivate, as of Aug 1st 2019.]

However, most of the submissions and the accepted papers are still from the field of medical informatics (25 (65%) of 38 submission). Unfortunately, the new offer has not yet been properly accepted by the other departments. Not only are fewer contributions submitted in absolute terms, but the proportion of enrichments for Stud Health Technol Inform is also lower than in Medical Informatics (Table 1).

Table 1. Contributions accepted for publication in Stud Health Technol Inform broken down by specialty. The percentages indicate how many of the accepted contributions are published in Stud Health Technol Inform.

Specialty  Accepted GMDS in IOS Press  Accepted Over all

Epidemiology  0  0%  32

Medical Bioinformatics and Systems Biology  2  20%  10

Medical Biometry  1  3%  35

Medical Documentation  1  11%  9

Medical Informatics  25  26%  96

Interdisciplinary  9  25%  36

total  38  17%  218

We see it as our task not only to maintain the status we have achieved, but also to make this form of publication of congress contributions attractive for the other specialist areas – so that we can keep the promise made in the title: To give an overview of current research in the German Medical Data Sciences.

Rainer Röhrig

Harald Binder

Hans-Ulrich Prokosch

Ulrich Sax

Irene Schmidtmann

Susanne Stolpe

Alfred Winter (MIBE)

Antonia Zapf