An essential guide to the literature

Welcome to a new feature in this exciting electronic and printed journal, keeping the reader up to date on controlled trials in the broad field of cardiovascular medicine. The journal includes articles describing the design and results of controlled trials, as well as reviews, commentaries and debates on topical issues. We would like to introduce you here to the latest new feature, the Paper Reports section, designed to save today's busy physicians both time and energy in keeping up with the literature.

Paper Reports are the work of a team of international contributors who comprehensively scan the relevant literature, screening it for the most important articles as they are published. Our aim is to establish online an efficient and timely updating service, concentrating on controlled trials activity throughout the world. The reports summarise the articles and briefly comment on their significance, saving you the time of searching the original literature. As experts will have read and summarised the articles on your behalf, you can be sure that the Paper Reports will become a great asset to you - once you've read a report, you can decide whether you need to read the article in depth for additional information. An easy 'click-through' option will enable you to access the abstract of the original article in PubMed (when available), and from there to the full article (if you subscribe to the journal in which the original article appeared).

The online format ensures that reports are always available and will be continuously updated. The online format also means that search facilities will be available, so you can find the reports that are most relevant to your interests, listed by the date the report went online or by topic (listed below). The journal will therefore become a 'living' information source, growing into a readily accessible database of essential information relating to controlled trials in cardiovascular medicine.

The journal and reports cover the following topics:

• Acute coronary syndrome

• Acute myocardial infarction

• Arrhythmias

• Atherosclerosis/Lipids/Hormones

• Heart failure

• Gene therapy

• Hypertension

• Interventional cardiology

• Issues in clinical trials

• Myocarditis/Pericarditis/Cardiomyopathies

• Secondary prevention

• Stroke

• Thromboembolism

Each topic area is headed by a Section Leader who is an internationally recognised authority in that field. The leaders are in the process of recruiting team members, who will be investigators in their own right with expertise in a specific subspecialty of the topic area. In this way, teams will cover the broad discipline of cardiovascular medicine between them.

With articles and reports being published online on a continuous basis, and being compiled for the printed version every two months, this novel format makes it possible for the busy clinician to keep up to date with the information that most affects clinical practice. For the researcher, it is a key that will unlock the literature via the scope of reports and the ability to provide links between topics and references. We hope you will become an avid reader and contributor to Current Controlled Trials in Cardiovascular Medicine.