2018 NEW YEAR ADDRESS OF ZOOLOGICAL RESEARCH

At the beginning of a wonderful new year, we look back at Zoological Research (ZR) in 2017. We are very grateful to all our readers and authors for your dedication and continued support of ZR. Your ideas, input, and enthusiasm have been of immense value in helping us to improve the journal. Here, we would like to share a few memorable events and people of the past year. Firstly, it is with deep regret and sorrow that we note the passing of Colin Peter Groves, Professor of Biological Anthropology from the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, on 30 November 2017. He was a long-standing and loyal friend of ZR, and joined our editorial board in 2014. He fulfilled his duties with dedication and diligence, and shared his outstanding expertise with opinions and constructive suggestions on many submissions to the journal. Despite his poor health, he continued to contribute to the journal (Groves, 2016) and was a respected member of our editorial board. We greatly cherish his contributions and generosity. We have also been inspired in the past year by the continued improvement in academic quality, total citations, and general influence of each of our publications. ZR achieved an estimated impact factor of 0.73 (based on the citation data from the Web of Science) and CiteScore of 0.84 (dated 11 January 2018, Scopus). We have also been fortunate with the addition of eleven outstanding experts who recently joined ZR as editorial members, including Yu-Hai Bi (Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China), Peng-Fei Fan (Sun Yat-Sen University, China), Patrick Giraudoux (University of Franche-Comté, France), Cyril C. Grueter (University of Western Australia, Australia), Wei-Zhi Ji (Kunming Institute of Zoology, CAS, China), Shu-Qiang Li (Institute of Zoology, CAS, China), Wen-Jun Liu (Institute of Microbiology, CAS, China), Julian Kerbis Peterhans (Roosevelt University, USA), Xiang-Guo Qiu (University of Manitoba, Canada), Rui-Chang Quan (Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, CAS, China), and Christian Roos (Leibniz-Institute for Primate Research, Germany). These remarkable specialists will bring new ideas and expertise to help reshape the journal. We are confident that our excellent editorial board will further facilitate the pivotal and active role of ZR in the field of science and publishing. In 2017, the “Project for Enhancing International Impact of China STM Journals” (PIIJ) (Class B) (2016–2018), the most extensive and influential journal fostering project in China, continued its support of ZR. With great effort from all editors and staff from the editorial office, ZR has been ranked among the top 300 “Outstanding S&T Journals of China”. Moreover, with the successive release of special issues focusing on academic topics of current interest, ZR has evolved into a vibrant journal with appreciable readability. In February 2017, ZR successfully hosted the “2017 Frontiers in Zoology Symposium” with the theme of “Animal Genomics and Ecological Protection”. We hope to replicate this success with the “2018 Frontiers in Zoology Symposium”, which will focus on “Comprehensive Scientific Investigation of Animals on the Tibetan Plateau and East Asia” (please find details at www.zoores.ac.cn). As such, we hope to see you in Kunming this coming spring. ZR also co-hosted the 2017 Annual Conference of the Chinese Herpetology Society. Such events are wonderful ways in which to meet up the old friends and colleagues as well as establish new contacts and share achievements and opinions. To facilitate scientific communication and promote subject development, ZR is not only increasing its academic value, but also consistently reinforcing the ethical integrity accompanying academic publications. In 2016, ZR published an editorial (Liu, 2016), letter to the editor (Joob & Wiwanitkit, 2016), and statement (http://www.zoores.ac.cn/ EN/abstract/abstract3772.shtml) regarding proper authorship. Publishing is of importance in almost every stage of a researcher’s career (Editorial Office of Zoological Research, 2016). Nowadays, under the background of big science, the advancement and elucidation of scientific questions often require collaboration among independent research groups, even those from different fields, to combine their expertise or specialties. Academia benefits from such extensive collaborations. As a result, we have observed that the proportion of co-first or co-corresponding author articles has significantly increased during the last few decades in many scientific journals. Akhabue & Lautenbach (2010) studied original research articles with equally contributing authors among five top life science journals, i.e., New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of American Medical Association, Annals of Internal Medicine, Lancet, and British Medical Journal. In 2000, the proportions of co-first or co-corresponding author papers in the five journals were <1%, 0%, 0%, <1%, and 0%, whereas in 2009, the proportions had significantly increased to 4.4%, 2.3%, 1.6%, 2.7%, and <1%, respectively. Li et al. (2013) studied the numbers of equally contributing articles in three major anesthesia journals (Anaesthesia, British Journal of Anaesthesia, and Anesthesia & Analgesia) over a 10-year period, and found that such papers increased significantly from 2002 to 2011 (0.9% to 8.8%, 0% to 8.8%, and 0.3% to 3.4%,