Onwards at the forefront of continuing education

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And for those who only look to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

John F Kennedy, 1963

I used the above title for my first editorial in May 1996,¹ and it seems appropriate to use it again, becaue this is my final Comment, but the ethos of Dental Update remains the same. As I wrote in 1996, that ‘Dental Update will continue to strive to produce material of interest and relevance to clinical practice’, reflecting what was written in the journal's first editorial in 1973,² namely, that the content would be ‘grounded in the realities of the daily work of the dental practitioner’.

Being editor of any journal is a privilege, given that an editor is the first person to pass ‘judgement’ on the work that authors have spent a lot of time writing, and often feel very close to. Deciding to reject a paper that has been submitted is therefore a decision that should not be taken lightly, but, part of the job of an editor is to be aware of what his/her subscribers might wish to read in their journal and, hence, it is necessary to sometimes make difficult decisions, even if those are unpalatable (no pun intended!) to the author(s).