This year, a total of 265 scientific contributions were submitted, including 79 full papers (5 for the GMS MIBE and 74 for Studies in Health Technologies and Informatics, Stud HTI), and 186 abstracts (115 for presentations and 71 posters). Overall, the number of submissions has increased significantly as compared to previous years. The number of full papers submitted has also risen particularly sharply (see Table 1).

Compared to the last three years, submissions have risen slightly in all disciplines, but particularly strongly for medical informatics and interdisciplinary contributions. However, cultural differences are also evident. For example, in the field of biometry and epidemiology, only abstracts and no or only a few full papers are traditionally submitted, but more workshops are submitted, which are not included in these statistics (see Table 2).

Each of the contributions was assessed by at least two reviewers. For the full papers in particular, but often also for the abstracts, many reviewers provided very comprehensive and constructive reviews with helpful advice for the authors. This has often contributed to a relevant improvement of the manuscript or abstract. Despite the increase in the number of papers to be reviewed and, in particular, the increase in full papers and the additional work associated with this, this year’s review process was successfully completed without a single day’s delay. The Editorial Board and Scientific Program Committee (SPC) would therefore like to thank the 228 reviewers (see below) for their 883 reviews. Their willingness and also the quality of the reviews cannot be taken for granted!

In the case of full papers, the editors’ decision on the acceptance of a full paper was firstly on the basis of the reviews. If the publication was rejected as a full paper, the SPC then decided whether to accept it as an abstract (talk or poster) or to reject it. Overall, the Editorial Board perceived the quality of the manuscripts submitted to be significantly better than in previous years. Nevertheless, many full papers had to be rejected because there were still weaknesses in the submitted form that could not be rectified within two weeks. Overall, the acceptance rate for full papers was 51% (40 out of 79), including 0% (0 out of 5) for MIBE and 54% (40 out of 74) for Stud HTI. It is striking that of the 33 papers rejected as full papers but accepted as abstracts, 5 were withdrawn, and the abstracts of 5 papers was not revised and were thus rejected. Of the rejected full papers, only about 70% accepted the offer to present their research work at the conference. You can see the complete course of the two-stage review process in Figure 1.

We look forward to the conference in Dresden with an exciting program featuring a total of 86 poster presentations and 140 lectures (see also Table 3) – plus numerous workshops, keynotes and tutorials.

(Editor in Chief GMDS-Series in Stud HTI) Rainer Röhrig

(Editor in Chief GMS MIBE) Petra Knaup-Gregori

(Congress Secretary, Chair of SPC) Martin Sedlmayr

(Bioinformatics and System Medicine) Niels Grabe

(Medical Informatics) Ursula Hertha Hübner

(Bioinformatics and System Medicine) Klaus Jung

(Epidemiology) Jochem König (Biometrics) Ingo Röder

(Medical Informatics) Ulrich Sax

(Epidemiology) Carsten Oliver Schmidt

(Epidemiology) Jochen Schmitt

(Biometrics) Antonia Zapf

(Biometrics) Daniela Zöller