A Time for Growth: JGME in 2025

The year 2025 brought enormous changes to every part of the world, from economic and political upheaval to new health care challenges, such as disease outbreaks (measles, dengue fever) and climate-related health effects, such as deaths and illnesses from extreme heat, air pollution, and wildfire smoke.^1,2 Throughout, the Journal of Graduate Medical Education (JGME) sought to remain a vibrant and safe space for discussions about complex or controversial issues. We aimed for plain-speaking, without spin, and continuity amid daily surprises. Readers will judge if those aims were achieved.

The past year was also a time of growth for JGME, with new editors, including new visual media and AI lead editors, and increases in submissions and electronic Table of Contents subscribers. JGME’s independent editorial board continues to prioritize diversity in specialty, gender, cultural and geographic location, career level—from residents to emeritus academicians, and other factors. Although varied, JGME Editorial Board members share a sincere desire to improve medical education, through improving authors’ written work and readers’ abilities to read critically. We also believe that we learn more from different voices; thus, we continually expand JGME’s reviewer pool, including through mentored reviews.

This editorial provides some journal metrics—with caveats that many readers will recall from last year’s 2024 summary. JGME varies from most medical education journals because it has a narrow focus on graduate medical education (GME), is entirely not-for-profit with no submission or publication fees and open access for readers, and produces 6 issues per year with a lean production team. As with other journals, metrics, such as time to first decision or acceptance, vary by article category, time of year, and internal vs external reviewed status (eg, Review article vs Letter to the Editor). JGME does not have a journal impact factor, although we remain under evaluation. We follow alternative metrics: article dissemination and citation information, such as Scopus (eg, Source Normalized Impact per Paper, or SNIP and CiteScore) and Google Analytics (Table).

Table.

JGME Data for 2025

All Submissions	1265
Research articlesa	806
Acceptance Rate, %; range
All articles	11.9; 6.5-21.9
Research articlesa	8.3; 6.5-12.3
Article Turnaround, mean (days)
Submission to first decision, all articles	37.8
Submission to first revise decision	75.5
Submission to final accept decision	174
Submission to reject decision	54.1
Submission to publication, months	9
Time for reviewers to respond to invite	2.5
Time for reviewers to complete review	14.8
Electronic Table of Contents Recipients	32 078
Podcast Downloads in 2025b	6569
Most Frequently Viewed Articles From 2025c
1. A Eulogy for the Primary Care Physician3
2. Workplace Experience as a Proxy for Privilege: An Unspoken Barrier Women Physicians Face in Career Advancement4
3. Digital Storytelling: Navigating Individual and Emerging Professional Selves Through Medical Memes5
4. Strategies to Enhance GME Program Coordinator Job Satisfaction and Well-Being6
5. To Catch a Catfish: A Cautionary Tale of Internet Unprofessionalism7
6. New US State Laws Conflict With ACGME Common Program Requirements8
7. Ready or Not, Here We Come: A Qualitative Study of the Transition From Graduate Medical Education to Independent Practice9
8. Challenges in Removing US Residency Training Requirements for State Licensure10
9. A Structured Approach to Mitigating Cognitive Bias in Educational Assessment11
10. Leader- and Team-Focused Strategies for Change During Transitions12

Note: Data include articles published January through December 2025.

^aOriginal Research, Educational Innovation, Brief Report, Reviews.

^bData retrieved from Libsyn Syndication Inc.

^cData retrieved from Counter5 and PowerBI analytics run by Silverchair.

In 2025 we continued our calls for articles on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in GME and added a call for climate/planetary health and GME articles. With a new lead visual media editor and 4 resident visual media editors, we were able to include visual abstracts within research articles and some non-research articles. JGME’s podcast, Hot Topics in MedEd,¹³ reached more listeners. JGME supported group reviewer options for junior scholars and delivered workshops focused on designing, writing, and interpreting medical education research at the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Annual Educational Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, and the International Conference on Residency Education (ICRE) in Quebec City, Canada. Several JGME editors retired and many new editors, in associate and resident/fellow categories, were recruited, including our first international resident editor.

As we look ahead to 2026, we are excited about our new AI Teaching Rounds section on the promise and perils of AI in medical education, science-based training, policy, and well-being of GME trainees and faculty. We will be presenting medical education workshops at the US ACGME Annual Educational Conference and the Canadian ICRE conference, along with a few other venues throughout the year. Other new initiatives are in the works.

As I write in early 2026, the world is still in daily turmoil with threats to humans and the planet. Most days the news is difficult to hear. At the same time medical education folk—authors, reviewers, readers, and editors—generously contribute their time and advice to improve GME and support trainees. JGME has greatly benefited from these contributions and the resulting nurturing environment. I like to think of the JGME Editorial Board as a large community of practice. All of us in medical education, around the world, are benefiting from a loosely linked international community of practice: sharing ideas, providing critiques, and gaining skills through learning from each other.

Thank you for reading, reviewing, and writing for JGME. Please share your thoughts with us regarding JGME’s past year and the year forward via email (jgme@acgme.org) or social media (https://bsky.app/profile/jgmejournal.bsky.social).