Transplant International: Looking Back at 2025, Looking Forward to 2026

Abstract

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Transplant International (TI) has had a busy year in 2025 and the start of a new year is an opportunity to thank our authors, reviewers and editors for the quality effort consented to make TI an ever improving and impactful journal. As an indicator of TI’s growing attractivity, the impact factor has increased as have the numbers of manuscript submissions.

To our authors: Several articles published in TI in 2025, addressing various topics in the broad field of organ replacement, have been the object of considerable interest. Some papers have already been cited a few times despite the short time elapsed since publication. Congratulations to the authors who have submitted these papers and contributed to the high-quality standards of the journal (Table 1).

Measuring impact early after publication is not easy and requires other metrics than numbers of citations. Indeed, a rapid analysis on Web of Science shows that articles published in Transplant International reach their peak citation numbers the third year after publication. This is in concordance with what has been previously reported elsewhere [11, 12]. For this reason, capturing the impact early after publication requires considering other more immediate indices such as numbers of views and downloads. Expectedly, a look at the top 10 viewed or downloaded papers shows that the overlap is only partial and 9 additional articles can be identified among TI papers of highest interest (Table 2).

The topics that have generated the most interest are xenotransplantation and machine perfusion. Unsurprisingly, the same topics are found at the top of TI editors’ selection of the most impactful papers published in 2025 in the field of clinical transplantation [22]. These 2 topics have been the focus of 2 special issues that just closed at the end of 2025 and titled “Current developments in artificial organs and engineered ex-situ perfused organs” and “Europeans and Xenotransplantation” [23, 24]. The collections are now complete and will be available as e-books in the coming months.

TI is extremely grateful to the reviewers who have spent their time and expertise to assess the papers submitted to our journal. We thank them for their voluntary participation, which is key to the scientific quality of the journal. The list of the reviewers who have contributed to TI in 2025 appears at the end of this editorial (Appendix Table 3).

The biennial ESOT Congress took place in London in 2025, from June 29 to July 2, and Transplant International participated actively to the congress activities. Sessions designed and organized by the editorial board and editorial fellows discussed some of the abstracts presented during the congress as well as a selection of articles recently published in TI and covering each of the five tracks defined by the scientific program committee. A “meet the editors” workshop, aiming at the younger delegates, discussed in an interactive format several aspects of scientific publication that are not always obvious for young investigators, such as the good use of biostatistics, artificial intelligence or social media. Importantly, a collection of review and original articles based on invited lectures and best communications presented at the congress is getting ready to be completed in the first quarter of 2026 [25]. Most contributions are already published online. Highlights include reviews on immune monitoring by donor-derived cell-free DNA in heart/lung transplantation torque-tenovirus in kidney transplantation [26, 27] and on the evolution of our understanding of vascular lesions in the kidney graft biopsies [28].

The Transplant International editorial fellowship program is an ongoing success! In addition to their mentoring in all aspects of scientific editing and publishing, editorial fellows are also engaged in communication projects for the journal and have been instrumental in creating new products, such as video abstracts of TI papers and launching a TI podcast.

2025 has been a busy and productive year, but more will come the way of TI readership in 2026. From the beginning of our tenure, it has been our stated aim to strengthen the relationship with ESOT leadership and membership. We endeavor to make TI a journal close to ESOT’s style and philosophy and integrate contents resulting from ESOT’s educational and scientific activities, in the strict respect of editorial independence. Transplant International is the journal of ESOT and of the European transplant community of physicians, surgeons, scientists and allied healthcare professionals. We believe that our efforts will help increase the standing of the journal and its identification as the journal of this dynamic community!