Dear Spinal Cord reader,

It is time to rejoice. The impact factor of Spinal Cord increased significantly from 1.067 in 2005 to 1.791 for 2006—an increase of 0.724.

The impact factor is a measure of citations to science and social science journals. It is used frequently as an indication of a journal's importance in its field. The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (now Thomson) and impact factors are calculated each year by Thomson Scientific for those journals which it indexes. Impact factors and indices are published annually in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The journal impact factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past 2 years have been cited in the JCR year. Alongside the raw impact factor value, it is also interesting to consider the rank of a journal in its JCR category. For 2006, Spinal Cord improved its ranking in ‘clinical neurology’ from 103/148 to 76/146.

We are happy with Spinal Cord's impact factor and ranking results for 2006 and hope that we can do even better in the future.

In this issue, you will find another collection of very interesting manuscripts and case reports. John Pierce, using selected original quotations and a historical review, has attempted to appraise the several steps leading to modern concepts of the ubiquitous sciatica. Original manuscripts give results from evaluations on neuropathic pain in non-traumatic spinal cord lesions (by Werhagen et al.), urinary infection with Proteus (by Trautner et al.), epidemiology in India (by Raja et al.), intraurethral stents (by Seoane Rodiquez et al.) and deep venous thrombosis (by Aito et al.). Garcia-Lopez et al. determined the influence of spinal cord injury on physiological processes such as distribution, metabolism and excretion of drugs. Case reports in this issue deal with Klippel–Feil anomaly (by Gupta et al.), Rosai–Dorfman disease (by Chang et al.) and intradural cavernous angioma (by Yingitkanli et al.).

Enjoy reading this issue and do not hesitate to submit your best work for publication in Spinal Cord—the International Voice of the Spinal Cord.