A message from the Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board, 2025: journal metrics and statistics, and appreciation to reviewers

In recent years, Anesthesia and Pain Medicine (APM) has achieved several important milestones, reflecting its continued growth and increasing international recognition.Following its inclusion in Scopus and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in 2023, APM was indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in August 2024, with coverage extending to articles published after 2022, beginning with Volume 17, Issue 1.These achievements underscore the journal's steady advancement in anesthesiology, perioperative medicine, critical care, and pain management, further strengthening its standing as an international scholarly journal.A particularly significant development occurred in June 2025, when APM received its first Journal Impact Factor (JIF).The 2024 JIF was 3.2, placing APM in the first quartile (Q1) at 13th out of 68 journals across the combined Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and ESCI categories, corresponding to the 81.6th percentile.This JIF was the highest among all ESCI-indexed anesthesiology and pain medicine journals, and even within the SCIE category, APM ranked 13th among 31 journals.This inaugural JIF represents a major milestone in the journal's history and serves as a testament to the quality, relevance, and growing influence of the research published in APM.The conflict between the government and medical community that began in February 2024 led to widespread resignations among medical residents in South Korea, resulting in a prolonged period of strain for practicing specialists that continued throughout 2025.In the absence of residents, faculty physicians were required to shoulder a substantially increased clinical burden, leaving limited time for research and scholarly activities.Consequently, academic productivity, including manuscript submissions from South Korea, was inevitably affected.In April 2025, the government revised the medical school admissions quota to the pre-crisis level of 3,058 students.However, most medical students and residents did not immediately return, and a large proportion of residents resumed training in October 2025.Even after their return, the academic and research environments have not fully recovered, and these prolonged disruptions may continue to affect scholarly productivity