We talk with Paul Robertson, MD, new Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM) about what readers can expect under his editorial leadership starting with a new look and feel starting January 2016.
Q. What attracted you to the role of Editor-in-Chief of JCEM?
A. I have been the editor-in-chief for several journals and enjoy the role immensely. In terms of JCEM specifically, I was attracted to the opportunity to perform in this position for the world’s most influential clinical endocrinology journal. I also saw the opportunity to make some changes in the journal’s format that will make its content more attractive and accessible to the Endocrine Society members.
Q. You talk about the notion of the “Whole endocrinologist.” Why in your opinion is there so much specialization in medicine and what is the place of specialties in medicine if specializations bring about their own set of challenges?
A. Specialization in medicine has been progressively increasing over the past seven decades. This has happened because the basic fund of knowledge increases with each year, so there is more to learn and remember. At the same time, in more recent decades that has been immense pressure on clinicians to shorten their clinical visits with patients, which also has the effect of encouraging physicians to focus on fewer and fewer disciplines within endocrinology as an efficiency measure. The challenge for JCEM is to encourage and facilitate broad accrual of new knowledge by clinical endocrinologists. This is important as invariably endocrine diseases affect more than one endocrine organ, hence, the need to remain a complete endocrinologist.
Q. How would you sum up the place of JCEM in the field of endocrinology? There are more than 100 biomedical journals in this space. What value does JCEM bring to the field?
A. JCEM enjoys a prestigious position in endocrinology literature. Because of that, it is widely read as the authoritative source of information. It also provides the opportunity to publish in a prestigious journal. Hence, we receive over 2500 manuscripts each year to review.
Q. We have a new JCEM cover and look starting this coming January! How is the new JCEM design going to benefit readers? What was the rationale of moving to a new design under your editorship?
A. The new design was created to reflect the fact we are a serious clinical research journal. We will now list the ten most highly scored manuscripts on the cover of each issue. The old design featured cover art that was often obscure and did not relate to content published in the Journal. I want the reader to see at a glance on the cover some of what is published in each issue rather than having to wade through pages of material before arriving at the Table of Contents.
Q. One of your goals is to bring the impact factor ranking of JCEM up to over 10. Can you share three initiatives you have planned to achieve this goal?
A. Impact factors are controversial, but they are a fact of life. We want our younger colleagues to send us their best material for publication. It is important to them to submit their work with the highest impact factors because where they publish is often used in their evaluations for promotion and in grant reviews. We as a Society have an obligation to help them develop their careers and want them to publish in JCEM. The ways we will increase the JCEM impact factor (defined as the number of citations it receives divided by the number of articles it publishes) are by accepting fewer articles and being certain the ones we do accept are of the highest possible equality.
Q. You talk about creating a more focused journal. In what way are you planning on achieving that? Are you considering fewer topic areas or focusing on a few major ones?
By focus, I mean to make the Table of Contents (TOC) and the content itself less diffuse. The TOC in the past used three different ways to present the titles, which took up additional space. This, plus redundancies of subtopics made the Journal bulky and less attractive. The new design will be more streamlined and easier to navigate.
Robertson is principal scientist of the Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute in Washington state. He can be reached at [email protected].
Loading ...