September sees the European Poultry Nutrition Symposium being hosted in the beautiful city of Dubrovnik, and I hope to see many members attending the conference. The WPSA will be holding their annual board meeting just prior to this event, as are other allied associations, taking advantage of the availability of delegates to attend other meetings as well as the sessions. So, if you haven’t already registered, please show your support for the organisers and the sponsors by doing so.

The current issue of the WPSJ includes papers covering topics related to nutrition and specialist feed ingredients, disease and vaccination, laying hens and egg production, reproductive physiology and a comprehensive review of performance factors. The increase in reviews regarding alternatives to antibiotics continues unabated, due to the impending bans for in-feed disease control expected across countries outside of the EU in the next few years, and in the editorial office we are expecting this trend to continue. Human disease from consumption of poultry meat remains a headline-grabber in the popular and academic media, and the industry is very proactive in putting control measures into place, even when the main issue of gastroenteritis in humans is, in reality, a problem from red meat and poor hygiene in the kitchen, as previous WPSJ reviews have ably demonstrated. Other pertinent issues in the poultry world include welfare and animal care – and we always welcome more review papers on these topics from authors – so please send them in.

Again, and I know I have mentioned this before, all authors need to ensure their summary is a true summary of the findings from their review, including average doses, responses, benefits etc. The summary is the first point of contact with people searching online for relevant papers and information. If they are not members, then they can only see the summary, so this must be comprehensive in order to maximise downloads of the complete papers or citation based on the summary. All journals are graded by their impact factor, which is calculated from the number of times a paper is cited in one year after publication or as a five-year average. To keep our impact factor competitive, maximising information from summaries is essential.

Dr Lucy Waldron

Editor