Start of year note 2020: Earth Pig goes, Metal Rat comes

According to the Chinese Zodiac, the year of the Earth Pig (土豬) for the year 2019 will end shortly. As promised, it brought us a feeling of joyful abundance and lightness 1. It helped us taking well‐considered actions and ensured stability. We had seen a series of exciting special issues guest edited by high‐level experts in the field. Just to name only those on Metabolism Cytometry 2 and on Imaging Flow Cytometry 3 that still raise a lot of interest within and beyond our community. The special issues announced last January 4 are ready or about to be finalized and will be published in the upcoming months. We could observe a continuing interest in Cytometry Part A by a steady increase in submission numbers, full text downloads, and citations. The submissions to special issues again increased and are at least 23% above those of 2018. So, no reason for complaints about the Earth Pig. In a festive spirit at Cytometry Part A, we closed the end of 2019 celebrating the publication of the second CYTO conference Workshop Report 5. Like for the last workshop report 6, which rendered over average full text downloads, I expect and hope again for here a great interest from the academic community and the industry.