The annual search for the best paper published in 2007 provided the usual renewed reading pleasures and selection challenge. Numerous outstanding papers underscored the vast range of eclectic topics and international talents whose work continues to enrich this journal. Several of the outstanding papers were coauthored by experienced members of our editorial board, including Torsten Jemt, Sreenivas Koka, Terry Walton, and Nicola Zitzmann. These colleagues deserve special recognition, even though they were not eligible for the competition. Of course, such seasoned clinical scholars will quite willingly make way for the newer outstanding recruits to the published field of clinical management of patients' oral rehabilitative needs. The clear-cut winner was Hein De Backer from Ghent, Belgium, who together with a number of his colleagues produced a small but impressive canon of work that studied long-term survival of different prosthodontic interventions. His publications in the IJP are a strong reminder of the importance of scrupulous documentation of clinical performance in the context of readily applied evaluative criteria. His was the rearview-mirror clinical approach to determining what is most likely to influence treatment outcomes in specific aspects of the discipline. I congratulate Dr De Backer on behalf of the IJP's 20 associate editors, who undertook the difficult task of selecting the best paper of 2007.