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Editorial
Who is the journal for? Ellen J Weber Is the journal for the author or the reader?
This was a question posed to me during my interview for the position of Editor in Chief for EMJ—and one I was keen to answer. Like many of you in emergency medicine, I’ve been both a producer and a consumer of journal articles. On the production end, I’ve conducted and published research, and served as a reviewer and editor, critiquing and selecting articles for publication submitted by others like myself. An excellent arrangement for an academic: my work is disseminated, hopefully advancing knowledge and creating change; my university promotes me because I am publishing and providing a professional service. The process also results in a steady (and ever-increasing) flow of manuscripts and a sizeable cadre of willing (and unpaid) reviewers for the journals. As a consumer—that is, a practising emergency clinician, with limited time and the attention span of a Labrador Retriever (and thus well suited to EM)—I find most journals exasperating. With the arrival of each month’s issue, I am presented with a dozen or so original research articles on a variety of topics. There is little context. The authors may tell me what research has come before, but often with the objective of explaining why this particular study is unique. They will dutifully catalogue the limitations but may then explain them away. Although each article has been previously peer reviewed by those with more expertise than I have in the given subject, making sense of it still requires me to assemble a journal club of one to determine if this work is relevant to my setting, and, importantly, whether the evidence is strong enough to implement in my practice. I am only willing to publicly admit my frustration because Richard Smith, Former Editor of the BMJ, thought similarly. In his farewell editorial in 2004, Smith reflected: “Increasingly I wonder as well if there isn’t something fundamentally misguided in sending ordinary clinicians, who are not scientists, piles of original papers that they mostly don’t read, often aren’t relevant to them, and they are not trained to appraise.”1 One of the central obligations (and challenges) for a journal and its editors is to disseminate advances in science, while at the same time helping clinicians apply the latest Correspondence to Dr Ellen J Weber, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, Box 0208, 505 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94143-0208, USA; [email protected] 2
information to their practices. Ten years after Richard Smith’s editorial, clinicians may have better appraisal skills, but that does not diminish this obligation. I believe that clinicians need synthesis, context and discussion, want help with teaching, and finding information quickly at the bedside, and want to know what others in their field are doing at home and abroad. So what was my answer to the interviewer’s question? “The journal should be for the reader, but right now, it is for the author—and the universities.” This is the perspective I bring to the role of Editor in Chief of EMJ. The journal has been in the very capable and creative hands of Kevin Mackway-Jones and Geoffrey Hughes for the past 7 years. From a fledgling journal, they have guided EMJ into a respected, scientifically rigorous publication. There will be no turning back on scientific quality; if anything, I expect it to improve over the years, as research in EM itself matures and the recognition of our critical role in the healthcare system brings us new sources of collaboration and funding. At the same time, we must put more focus on the reader. To this end, we will be experimenting (yes, experimenting) with changes in the journal that we hope will improve its interest and relevance. All newly accepted research will include a box briefly summarising the context of the research and its implications; you should begin to see these in some articles in the next few months. In upcoming issues, we will launch a feature called Top Ten (or maybe nine, or 11, depending on the topic), in which we’ll provide a synthesis of recent research findings published in EM and non-EM journals that are important to your practice, as well as recommendations of best apps for the bedside, teaching strategies, trainee survival tips and so forth, all written by experts on the subject. Additionally, we are setting our sites on the world! EMJ is already an international journal with contributions from many nations. In order to bring even more of the world’s best EM research and commentary, we will have two new Associate Editors: Paul Middleton, MD and Teri Reynolds, MD. Paul is an international expert in prehospital care and resuscitation living in Australia, a country well known for its EMS expertise (as well as the most deadly snakes and jellyfish). Paul will serve as the Associate Editor for articles on trauma, resuscitation and EMS. Teri has been teaching and practising EM in Tanzania for the past 4 years and will serve as Global Health Editor. In this issue, she launches “The view from here”, a
new feature that allows readers to share perspectives on EM practice in challenging circumstances, as well as thought-provoking insights from more traditional settings. Paul and Teri join Deputy Editors Steve Goodacre and Ian Maconochie, and Associate Editors Mary Dawood and Simon Carley to comprise our editorial team. Geoff Hughes will continue to provide commentary, and Kevin Mackway-Jones will continue to head up the BETS. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude for all the contributions made by our former Associate Editors Darren Walter, Jonathan Wyatt and Janos Baombe. We are looking to create a lively forum for controversy, discussion and education, both in the print journal and on our website. We welcome submission of letters and commentary on issues important to you, as well as responses to articles we publish. With a newly created web and social media team, we hope to stimulate interaction among our readers. Most importantly, we want to know what you think, as readers of the journal, practising clinicians and researchers and scientists. Are we heading in the right direction? What else should we do? We welcome your feedback and suggestions. Drop us an email at: [email protected]. In closing this inaugural editorial, let me address the elephant (or the American) in the room. Yes, I am from the USA, and that may seem an odd fit for the official journal of the UK College of Emergency Medicine. EM, however, is an international discipline; the more I learn about EM in other countries, the more I see the similarities of our practices and challenges. Even in Tanzania, where I am writing this editorial, a request for a consultation on a female patient with abdominal pain engenders the identical squabble witnessed in San Francisco between the surgeons and gynaecologists about who should see the patient first. We may use different triage scores, and different c-spine rules, or assess our chest pain patients with different tools, but we have the same need for guidance to provide the best care. As an international journal, EMJ’s foremost message is that we are more similar than we are different, and we can all learn from each other. Contributors This article was conceived and written by EJW. There are no other contributors. EJW takes full responsibility for the work and controlled the decision to publish. Competing interests None. Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed. To cite Weber EJ. Emerg Med J 2014;31:2. Accepted 5 November 2013 Emerg Med J 2014;31:2. doi:10.1136/emermed-2013-203388
REFERENCE 1
Smith R. Traveling but never arriving: reflections of a retiring editor. BMJ 2004;329:242–4.
Weber EJ. Emerg Med J January 2014 Vol 31 No 1
Downloaded from http://emj.bmj.com/ on April 11, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
Who is the journal for? Ellen J Weber Emerg Med J 2014 31: 2
doi: 10.1136/emermed-2013-203388 Updated information and services can be found at: http://emj.bmj.com/content/31/1/2
These include:
References Email alerting service
This article cites 1 articles, 1 of which you can access for free at: http://emj.bmj.com/content/31/1/2#BIBL Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up in the box at the top right corner of the online article.
Notes
To request permissions go to: http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions To order reprints go to: http://journals.bmj.com/cgi/reprintform To subscribe to BMJ go to: http://group.bmj.com/subscribe/
Editorial
Who is the journal for? Ellen J Weber Is the journal for the author or the reader?
This was a question posed to me during my interview for the position of Editor in Chief for EMJ—and one I was keen to answer. Like many of you in emergency medicine, I’ve been both a producer and a consumer of journal articles. On the production end, I’ve conducted and published research, and served as a reviewer and editor, critiquing and selecting articles for publication submitted by others like myself. An excellent arrangement for an academic: my work is disseminated, hopefully advancing knowledge and creating change; my university promotes me because I am publishing and providing a professional service. The process also results in a steady (and ever-increasing) flow of manuscripts and a sizeable cadre of willing (and unpaid) reviewers for the journals. As a consumer—that is, a practising emergency clinician, with limited time and the attention span of a Labrador Retriever (and thus well suited to EM)—I find most journals exasperating. With the arrival of each month’s issue, I am presented with a dozen or so original research articles on a variety of topics. There is little context. The authors may tell me what research has come before, but often with the objective of explaining why this particular study is unique. They will dutifully catalogue the limitations but may then explain them away. Although each article has been previously peer reviewed by those with more expertise than I have in the given subject, making sense of it still requires me to assemble a journal club of one to determine if this work is relevant to my setting, and, importantly, whether the evidence is strong enough to implement in my practice. I am only willing to publicly admit my frustration because Richard Smith, Former Editor of the BMJ, thought similarly. In his farewell editorial in 2004, Smith reflected: “Increasingly I wonder as well if there isn’t something fundamentally misguided in sending ordinary clinicians, who are not scientists, piles of original papers that they mostly don’t read, often aren’t relevant to them, and they are not trained to appraise.”1 One of the central obligations (and challenges) for a journal and its editors is to disseminate advances in science, while at the same time helping clinicians apply the latest Correspondence to Dr Ellen J Weber, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, Box 0208, 505 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94143-0208, USA; [email protected] 2
information to their practices. Ten years after Richard Smith’s editorial, clinicians may have better appraisal skills, but that does not diminish this obligation. I believe that clinicians need synthesis, context and discussion, want help with teaching, and finding information quickly at the bedside, and want to know what others in their field are doing at home and abroad. So what was my answer to the interviewer’s question? “The journal should be for the reader, but right now, it is for the author—and the universities.” This is the perspective I bring to the role of Editor in Chief of EMJ. The journal has been in the very capable and creative hands of Kevin Mackway-Jones and Geoffrey Hughes for the past 7 years. From a fledgling journal, they have guided EMJ into a respected, scientifically rigorous publication. There will be no turning back on scientific quality; if anything, I expect it to improve over the years, as research in EM itself matures and the recognition of our critical role in the healthcare system brings us new sources of collaboration and funding. At the same time, we must put more focus on the reader. To this end, we will be experimenting (yes, experimenting) with changes in the journal that we hope will improve its interest and relevance. All newly accepted research will include a box briefly summarising the context of the research and its implications; you should begin to see these in some articles in the next few months. In upcoming issues, we will launch a feature called Top Ten (or maybe nine, or 11, depending on the topic), in which we’ll provide a synthesis of recent research findings published in EM and non-EM journals that are important to your practice, as well as recommendations of best apps for the bedside, teaching strategies, trainee survival tips and so forth, all written by experts on the subject. Additionally, we are setting our sites on the world! EMJ is already an international journal with contributions from many nations. In order to bring even more of the world’s best EM research and commentary, we will have two new Associate Editors: Paul Middleton, MD and Teri Reynolds, MD. Paul is an international expert in prehospital care and resuscitation living in Australia, a country well known for its EMS expertise (as well as the most deadly snakes and jellyfish). Paul will serve as the Associate Editor for articles on trauma, resuscitation and EMS. Teri has been teaching and practising EM in Tanzania for the past 4 years and will serve as Global Health Editor. In this issue, she launches “The view from here”, a
new feature that allows readers to share perspectives on EM practice in challenging circumstances, as well as thought-provoking insights from more traditional settings. Paul and Teri join Deputy Editors Steve Goodacre and Ian Maconochie, and Associate Editors Mary Dawood and Simon Carley to comprise our editorial team. Geoff Hughes will continue to provide commentary, and Kevin Mackway-Jones will continue to head up the BETS. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude for all the contributions made by our former Associate Editors Darren Walter, Jonathan Wyatt and Janos Baombe. We are looking to create a lively forum for controversy, discussion and education, both in the print journal and on our website. We welcome submission of letters and commentary on issues important to you, as well as responses to articles we publish. With a newly created web and social media team, we hope to stimulate interaction among our readers. Most importantly, we want to know what you think, as readers of the journal, practising clinicians and researchers and scientists. Are we heading in the right direction? What else should we do? We welcome your feedback and suggestions. Drop us an email at: [email protected]. In closing this inaugural editorial, let me address the elephant (or the American) in the room. Yes, I am from the USA, and that may seem an odd fit for the official journal of the UK College of Emergency Medicine. EM, however, is an international discipline; the more I learn about EM in other countries, the more I see the similarities of our practices and challenges. Even in Tanzania, where I am writing this editorial, a request for a consultation on a female patient with abdominal pain engenders the identical squabble witnessed in San Francisco between the surgeons and gynaecologists about who should see the patient first. We may use different triage scores, and different c-spine rules, or assess our chest pain patients with different tools, but we have the same need for guidance to provide the best care. As an international journal, EMJ’s foremost message is that we are more similar than we are different, and we can all learn from each other. Contributors This article was conceived and written by EJW. There are no other contributors. EJW takes full responsibility for the work and controlled the decision to publish. Competing interests None. Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed. To cite Weber EJ. Emerg Med J 2014;31:2. Accepted 5 November 2013 Emerg Med J 2014;31:2. doi:10.1136/emermed-2013-203388
REFERENCE 1
Smith R. Traveling but never arriving: reflections of a retiring editor. BMJ 2004;329:242–4.
Weber EJ. Emerg Med J January 2014 Vol 31 No 1
Downloaded from http://emj.bmj.com/ on April 11, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
Who is the journal for? Ellen J Weber Emerg Med J 2014 31: 2
doi: 10.1136/emermed-2013-203388 Updated information and services can be found at: http://emj.bmj.com/content/31/1/2
These include:
References Email alerting service
This article cites 1 articles, 1 of which you can access for free at: http://emj.bmj.com/content/31/1/2#BIBL Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up in the box at the top right corner of the online article.
Notes
To request permissions go to: http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions To order reprints go to: http://journals.bmj.com/cgi/reprintform To subscribe to BMJ go to: http://group.bmj.com/subscribe/
