Mehmet Gürel

Distinguished readers,

We would like to thank to all our stakeholders contributing to the admission of our journal to the PubMed index in the year 2014, mainly to the previous editor of our journal Prof. Dr. İskender Sayek. Our journal is published only in the electronic environment and all the articles are presented in English. We hope that these developments, which we deem to be an important step in endowing it with an international character, have also received your support.

In this issue, we included case reports extensively although clinical studies have the dominance. We expect to have more interventional clinical studies featured in our journal. The study measuring red cell distribution width in patients with acute cholecystitis and indicating that it returned to normal levels after surgical intervention, emphasizes once again the significance of early surgical treatment for this disease. The article highlighting the successful application of minimally invasive para-thyroid surgery shows that minimally invasive interventions are gaining paramount importance in every field of general surgery. Finally, the study exploring gastric tonometry in patients unable to undergo computerized tomography examination constitutes an example for prospective interventional clinical studies which we hope will gradually increase in number.

We maintain our efforts to make sure that our journal be included in other international indexes such as Science Citation Index Expanded, now that it has recently been included in the PubMed index. We hope that you will provide great contributions to this goal, and use the studies published in our journal as references in your future publications, thereby helping us achieving this aim.

Once again, I would like to thank all the readers, authors and reviewers of our journal as well as the AVES group for enabling its transfer to the electronic environment, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Can Atalay for bearing all the burden of our journal. I wish that we will meet at better issues in a more favorable environment in the future, and would like to extend my kindest regards to all of you.

Prof. Dr. Mehmet Gürel
Editor