I am honored to have been given the opportunity to serve as the ALM's new Editor-in-chief. First of all, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to my predecessors (Prof. Myoung Hee PARK, Prof. Eui-Chong KIM, Prof. Kyung Soon SONG, Prof. Kyungwon LEE, Prof. Chan-Jeoung PARK, and Prof. Jeong-Ho KIM) for their enthusiastic efforts to improve the quality of the journal (timely decisions, timely publication, and attractive design and layout).

I am very pleased that professors Jong Hee SHIN, Kyung A LEE, and Young-Ae LIM have agreed to continue to serve as associate editors and that two distinguished clinical pathologists, Prof. Sail CHUN (clinical chemistry and laboratory informatics) and Prof. Hyun Kyung KIM (diagnostic hematology), have newly joined the associate editorial board. I'm also delighted to announce that a new assistant editor (Prof. Mina HUR) and a manuscript editor (Dr. Hye-Seong PARK) have joined the editorial team. All editorial members will make every effort to screen submitted articles in timely manner so that we can ensure early and prudent decisions regarding their publication. Finally, I would like to thank Prof. Myoung Hee PARK for her continued effort and enthusiasm for scientific editing of all accepted articles.

As the editor-in-chief, I would like to improve scientific and educational values, as well as the journal's impact factors (JIFs). Even though there were several shortcomings and criticisms regarding the use of impact factors, JIFs are widely publicized and may influence authors' decision where to submit their manuscripts. Therefore, they are frequently used as proxies for the relative importance of a journal within its field [2]. Many editors-in-chief have thought about improving their JIFs [3-6]. Accordingly, I would like to adapt and build various editorial strategies to improve our JIF while adhering to the accepted ethical standards. These strategies will include: (1) improvement of publication time by continuous monitoring and announcement; (2) inclusion of systemic review articles that have a higher likelihood of earning citations; (3) weighing of articles in favor of earlier issues, a step that will have some positive effect on the impact factor; (4) tailoring of titles and abstracts of articles to render them high visible on Internet search engines while preserving their intended meanings; and (5) shortening of the time from submission to publication by electronically publishing accepted manuscripts before final editing, when appropriate.

As you can see, we have a new journal name, new features and design, and new editorial members. In popular discourse, the term "quantum leap" refers to a large increase. We will try to make a scientific, educational, and impact-wise quantum leap in our journal. I encourage all the readers and authors to offer suggestions to achieve this goal.