A Vision for JGIM

”Dad, is that your journal?,” my five-year-old son, Jamie, asked excitedly, as he went through my mail. We had just returned from a day trip to Philadelphia. I had taken him with me to a meeting with the current Editor and Associate Editors of JGIM(who graciously welcomed my young associate), followed by visits to the Franklin Institute and the Liberty Bell. He recognized the JGIM letters on the cover page and wanted to know what they spelled. He wanted to know if my name was in the journal. He wanted to see the names of the people he met. He wanted to know what an editor did.

As I tried to explain, I could not help but think of the size of the footsteps I will be following as the next Editor of JGIM. From Suzanne and Robert Fletcher, to David Dale, to Sankey Williams, the Editors have superbly guided the Journal from its birth in 1986¹ to its current position as one of the very best general medical journals in the world. Under the guidance of Dr. Williams for the last five years, the Journal has remained true to its founders' commitment to quality. The Journal also has continued to rise in the ranking of the impact of general medicine journals that is kept by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)—from number 29 in 1995 to number 13 in 1997.² The practical importance of work published in JGIM can be seen by reviewing some of the most frequently cited articles that have appeared in the Journal since 1996. These include a qualitative study of how doctors and patients discuss routine clinical decisions,³ a study on the failure to prescribe warfarin to patients with nonrheumatic atrial fibrillation,⁴ a survey that explained why patients of female physicians had higher rates of breast and cervical cancer screening than patients of male physicians,⁵ a study that demonstrated that a two-question case-finding instrument was a useful measure for detecting depression in primary care,⁶ and a meta-analysis of randomized control trials that showed the efficacy of brief interventions in heavy alcohol drinkers.⁷ The impact of the Journal is even more impressive when you consider the relatively small size of the Journal's circulation. Indeed, as one of my colleagues pointed out, the impact per 1,000 readers is several times greater for JGIM than for the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Annals of Internal Medicine.

With these thoughts in mind, I will humbly try to articulate my vision for the next phase of JGIM's growth. This vision for JGIM is based on the fundamental premise that JGIM should be a partner to the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) and all of its members, and not just a vehicle for publishing articles. As a partner, JGIM should share the mission of SGIM. That mission is to promote improved patient care, research and teaching in primary care, and general internal medicine.⁸JGIM also should share the core values of SGIM and its members. It should be committed to helping SGIM and its members achieve their goals. It should be responsive to the needs and views of SGIM members and all JGIM readers and contributors.

With this as the fundamental premise, I have four major goals for the Journal that can be boiled down to four words: quality, innovation, impact, and caring. The first goal is to continue the Journal's well-established tradition of putting quality first. This means that my editorial team must make continual efforts to improve the peer review process, making sure that it is rigorous and yet as efficient as possible. I plan to use the investigative expertise of the editorial team to develop and evaluate methods for improving the peer review process. The second goal is to actively foster innovation and creativity in the work that is published in the Journal. I will change the instructions for authors to encourage contributors to give greater attention to innovative aspects of their work, and I will change the instructions for reviewers to place more emphasis on evaluating creativity. In addition, my editorial team will consider alternative formats for articles that do not fit the traditional mold. The third goal is to explore new ways of increasing the impact of work that is published in the Journal. I will encourage contributors, reviewers, and editors to think about ways to maximize the impact of each piece of work. One of the most important tasks for the editorial team will be to capitalize on recent advances in electronic communication to develop new initiatives for disseminating information about contributors' work to clinical practitioners and consumers. New initiatives are needed to make such information more readily available not only to the Journal's traditional audience of academic general internists, but also to other general internists and primary care practitioners, medical subspecialists who retain an interest in general internal medicine, and regular people who need to know more about what general internal medicine has to offer. The fourth goal is to promote work that will demonstrate SGIM's commitment to caring for people who have the greatest needs. Priority will be given to publishing high-quality work that addresses the needs of those who are disadvantaged or that addresses other social issues about which SGIM members are passionate. We need to give more attention to the major social challenges of our times, as put forth so eloquently by Dr. Christine Cassel in the Peterson Honor Lecture at the 1999 national SGIM meeting.

To achieve these goals, I plan for JGIM to be a cutting-edge journal that will seek input from readers and experiment with new approaches. If JGIM retains its commitment to quality and extends its reach, it will continue its climb up the rankings of medical journals. More importantly, however, I want JGIM to be the best journal to read for anyone who wants to know about the state of the art of research, teaching, and patient care in general internal medicine.

As I told my son, it's not my journal, it's yours!