Requiem for a journal

Despite opinions to the contrary, the demise of the Annals of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, reported recently in CMAJ,¹ represents a significant loss to the Canadian medical literature. Although the Annals might have been perceived as having little importance to those in private practice for whom clinical specialty journals are more relevant, the journal did play an important role in Canadian academic medicine.

Like medical science, medical education and specialty training are constantly evolving. Today's trainees are not the same as those of decades past, and their training programs have also changed. The only way that training programs and curricula will continue to improve is through evaluation, change and debate. By publishing original, peer-reviewed articles on medical education and related research, as well as articles on biomedical ethics and Canadian medical history, the Annals provided a unique forum for such debate. Journals of medical education exist in the United States and the United Kingdom, but they are not readily accessible to Canadian physicians. Moreover, only rarely do Canadian articles appear in those journals.

Given the proliferation of both peer-reviewed and non-reviewed Canadian journals over the past decade, we might have expected that a journal published by an institution as respected as the Royal College could have found a way to survive.

Eric M. Yoshida Program Director Adult Gastroenterology Training Program University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC