Last year was the first year we chose to highlight a list of top articles. Though we are a highly selective journal, it is hard to resist the temptation to highlight particularly noteworthy articles.

To arrive at the top articles, the Editor-in Chief and Deputy Editor-in-Chief considered a list of about 30 based on full-text downloads, Altmetrics (a score measuring attention to articles in terms of conventional news media as well as social media, such as Twitter, blog posts, and so on) and selection as “Editor’s Choice” for a given print issue. From this list, the editors ranked these articles and then compared notes to generate a shorter list of 15 articles. We then asked the members of the Editorial Advisory Board to identify their top five articles based on study quality, interest of the topic, and perceived potential for impact.

The votes showed substantial dispersal, with none standing head and shoulders of above others, highlighting the high quality of the articles overall. We therefore hesitate to draw attention to a single “Article of the Year” or even a Top 5. Since the articles have to appear in some sort of order, we did list them according to the number of votes they received. But, any ranked order with these articles will be arbitrary and should thus not be emphasized—the votes were too close and the motivations for drawing attention to the articles too varied. They truly warrant attention as a group.

Looking at the group, one is immediately struck by the range of topics and methodologies—the development and evaluation of a strategy to mitigate errors due to interruption during chemotherapy verification and administration, a synthesis of data from several epidemiologic studies to estimate the national frequency of serious diagnostic delays in the outpatient setting, an elegant study of the Hawthorne Effect in monitoring hand hygiene compliance, and an impressive time series analysis at two hospitals evaluating the impact on hospital mortality of an electronic early warning surveillance system. The list also includes qualitative research studies, such as a study of the impact of electronic medical record implementation on hospital communication and the development of a taxonomy to code patient complaints.

This range in topics and methodologies reflects the diversity of the fields of healthcare quality and patient safety and is a source of pride to us at BMJ Quality and Safety. Thus, we offer our thanks to the authors of these papers listed as the Top 10 Articles of 2014. But, we also thank the authors of numerous other high quality papers published the journal, many of which could just as easily have appeared on this list.

Kaveh G. Shojania, MD
Editor-in-Chief

Mary Dixon-Woods, PhD
Deputy Editor-in-Chief