Embracing the Dragon‐Horse Spirit: Gratitude and forward momentum

Dragon-Horse Spirit: A metaphor for a person's vigorous and enterprising spirit and demeanor. Inspired by this spirit, iMeta and its sister journals have achieved a series of groundbreaking advancements in submission and impact over the past 4 years. As the Chinese Year of the Horse is coming, we extend our gratitude to all the editorial board members, associate editors, youth editors, and reviewers who have contributed to the development of iMeta series. As the Year of the Horse gallops in, heralding energy, perseverance, and progress, it is our great honor, as the Editors-in-Chief of iMeta, to extend our warmest New Year greetings and deepest gratitude to our global community. May we all embody the Dragon-Horse Spirit—that vibrant fusion of mythical strength and steadfast endurance—in our shared pursuit of scientific excellence. The past year has been one of remarkable growth for iMeta [1]. We have witnessed a significant surge in manuscript submissions (total 1786 submissions in 2025, Figure 1A) and median time to publication in about 2–3 months (Figure 1B). Many thanks to the 1613 reviews completed by reviewers (Figure 1C,D), the number of publications in iMeta is grown fast to 109 in 2025 (Figure 1E, up to 212 including sister journals), with 843,045 times full text down and 9365 citations, a testament to the journal's rising recognition (Figure 1F). More importantly, we have been inspired by the consistently high quality and innovative spirit of the researches we received. This progress directly turns into our expanding influence (the real-time Impact Factor of 2025 predicted 40+, Figure 1G, citation data from Web of Science, 2025/1/26), an achievement made possible by your collective efforts. However, several aspects still need to be improved in the future. The review paper is lack, only 4 published in iMeta last year (Figure 1E) [2-5], iMeta and its sister journals welcome all kinds of researches and reviews in biology and medicine. Papers reviewed by top journals are welcome to transfer to iMeta as a revision with a response letter, such as Nature [6], Cell [7]. In 2025, over 1000 papers were rejected and published in other journals, such as Advanced Science [8], Microbiome [9], Water Research [10], Cancer Communications [11], Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy [12], and Science Bulletin [13]. Thus, iMetaOmics was launched in 2024 for comprehensive biology and medicine in the omics era [14-16], iMetaMed was launched in 2025 for comprehensive medicine research [17-19], and iMetaPharm will be launched in 2026 for pharmaceutical research (Figure 1H). To broaden the journal's scope and impact, more sister journals will be launched in future. While maintaining our strengths in bilingual main text and long videos in social media promotion, we are also expanding our efforts to include short videos [20]. Our sincere thanks go to every author who entrusted us with their work, to the diligent reviewers whose insights ensured rigor, to our dedicated editorial team and board for their guidance, and especially to our young editorial board members for their exceptional energy. Finally, we thank our readers, whose engagement fuels our mission. Carrying this Dragon-Horse Spirit into the new year, the iMeta team pledges to redouble our efforts. We remain steadfast in our commitment to serving our authors and readers with utmost efficiency and integrity. Our goal is to continue publishing the most outstanding scientific achievements and to relentlessly pursue greater academic impact. Together, let us drive iMeta forward with vigor and determination toward a year of groundbreaking discoveries. Happy Chinese New Year 2026! Yong-Xin Liu: Conceptualization; writing—original draft; writing—review and editing. Yunyun Gao: Visualization; writing—review and editing; data curation. Tong Chen: Writing—review and editing. Danyi Li: Writing—review and editing. Canhui Lan: Writing—review and editing. Chun-Lin Shi: Writing—review and editing. Jingyuan Fu: Writing—review and editing. Shuang-Jiang Liu: Conceptualization; writing—original draft; writing—review and editing. Shuang-Jiang Liu and Jingyuan Fu are the Editors-in-Chief of iMeta. Yong-Xin Liu, Tong Chen, Danyi Li, and Canhui Lan are the executive editors of iMeta. Chun-Lin Shi is the academic editor of iMeta. Yunyun Gao is the associate editor of iMeta.