JCHIMP at 5 years: growth and development

In 2010, the Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives (JCHIMP) was conceived from the Community Hospital Assembly of the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM). A number of factors influenced the development of this idea, including the need for a scholarly platform that focused on community hospital academics and the emergence of online medical journals throughout the United States and the world, which could improve the efficiency of the publication process. The developmental process was led by an inspired core group of APDIM members ably assisted by David Solomon of Michigan State University, a pioneer in medical electronic publishing (1).

Volume 1, issue # 1, was posted in 2011. There were six papers, all but one from Baltimore where the journal is based. In 2011, the first year of its publication, 2,500 unique individuals accessed the four issues. With this publication today, we complete volume 5. This is the first time we have had six issues in one volume (Table 1). Volume 5 has included 90 manuscripts compared with 31 manuscripts published in volume 1. There is no limit to the number of papers published electronically beyond the capacity of the reviewers and the editors. Our 5-year totals are impressive – 22 issues, 252 published manuscripts, and 53,000 unique individual readers from 155 countries as of 1 October 2015. The unique individual curve is getting steeper each year (Fig. 1), with more than 2,000 new readers each month in 2015.

Table 1.

This table shows the number of manuscripts published and issues per year

Year	# of manuscripts	# of issues per year
2011	31	4
2012	41	4
2013	30	3 due to hiatus
2014	60	5
2015	90	6

Fig. 1.

Cumulative unique visitors.

The institutional support for JCHIMP changed in 2013 when I left Medstar Union Memorial in Baltimore and accepted a faculty position at Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC). Although we have been working with Co-Action Publishing based in Stockholm, Sweden, since 2011, the financial sponsorship switched primarily to GBMC in 2013. Jen Huff has served as a very capable journal steward during the past 2 years. Although we published the fewest number of issues (3) and papers (34) during the 2013 hiatus because of the changeover, we resumed our normal publishing schedule in 2014 and have been climbing since. The journal was born again in late 2013 (2). Despite the lower volumes in 2013, we coincidentally received PubMed certification the same year including for all the papers previously published in the journal since 2011. The unusual rapidity of the process was largely because of the efforts and skills of Co-Action Publishing.

One of the many advantages of the medium of electronic publication is the efficiency of the process. Our review and editing timetable targets are seen in Fig. 2. Barring reviewer or author delays, it should take between 3 and 5 months to publish an article from the day of its initial submission.

Fig. 2.

JCHIMP manuscript production cycle.

We have evolved into a national and international journal. Our manuscript-contributing institutions, from 15 states and 4 foreign countries, have grown from 3 in issue # 1 to 40 in volume 5. The categories of various publications are listed in Table 2. The most recent additions are Patient Safety edited by Paul Foster, program director at GBMC and Research Theory edited by Lucien Cardinal program director from Long Island. We are always open for new category ideas.

Table 2.

JCHIMP publishing categories

Editor's Perspective

Case Reports

Original Research

Patient Safety

Medical Education/Medical Student

History of Medicine

EKG Images

Radiology Images

Clinical Images

Letters to the Editor

You cannot have a peer-reviewed journal without peer reviewers. Our current list of peer reviewers continues to grow, a necessity considering our climbing publication numbers. The peer reviewers who completed a JCHIMP review in 2015 are listed in Table 3. We try to limit review requests per year to no more than three or four for each reviewer.

Table 3.

JCHIMP peer reviewers 2015

Carlos Acuna	Tracy Doering	Farnaz Houshmand	Jayaprakash Manda	Avinash Ravipati
Amesh Adalja	Jennifer Dooley	Duosha Hu	Henry Meilmani	Andrew Rettew
Amitesh Agarwal	Doantrang Du	Asad Jehangir	Janet Memark	Sara Richter
Nnabuchi Akpeh	Ahmad Elashery	Samuel Jonas	Marita Mike	Timothy Ryan
Chuck Albrecht	Jeremy Ellis	Syung Min Jung	Hmu Minn	Mohsen Saadat
Richard Alweis	Sherif Eltawansy	Alan Kaell	Penchala Mittadodla	Fardad Sarabchi
Donna Astiz	Emmanuel Elueze	Paras Karmacharya	Robabeh (Ruby) Mohammadzadeh	Emily Schehlein
Hamza Auraksai	Margaret Eng	Paul Kempen	Mahsa Mohebtash	Carlton Sextion
Hooman Bakhsi	Robert Ferguson	Maryam Kestkar Jahromi	Harsha Moole	Chirag Sheth
Kareen Beekman	Paul Foster	Ramesh Khurana	Salman Muddassir	Mansur Shomali
Victoria Bengaulid	Andrew Frei	Victor Kolade	Marc Mugmon	Deepak Shrivastava
Vijaya Bhatt	Ethan Fried	Kiran Kommaraju	Binh Nguyen	Waqas Shuaib
Ewelina Biskup	Joseph Fuscaldo	Robert Kornberg	Vamshi Nimmagadda	Peter Sloane
Yvonne Braver	Steven Gambert	Mahesh Krishnamurthy	Fnu Nutan	David Smith
Yuanning Cao	Morey Gardner	Sapna Kuehl	Adetokunbo Oluwasanjo	Bishnu Subedi
Lucien Cardinal	George Gariss	Amit Kulkarni	Ali Ozhand	Daniel Summers
Harjit Chahal	Sushil Ghimire	Alexandre Lacasse	Venkataraman Palabindala	Linda Thomas
Chester Choi	Ibrahim Ghobrial	Ankush Lahoti	Kinnari Parikh	Yue Wang
Dobbin Chow	Subhash Gorrepati	Jeff Larochelle	Jimmy Pham	David Weisman
Francis Christian	Sunil Goyal	Brooke Leachman	Amareshwar Podugu	David Widlus
John Cmar	Gaurav Gulati	May Lee	Richard Pomerantz	Bud Williams
Ricardo Conti	Shanu Gupta	Fritz Lubin	Dilli Poudel	Manajyoti Yadav
Tirumala Dammalapati	Rimoun Hakim	Phillip Mackowiak	Khalid Qazi	Eugene York
Stefan David	James Hanley	Srinivasa Madhavan	Celeste Quianzon	Jessica Young
Janaki Deepak	Charin Hanlon	Naba Mainali	Shweta Ramsahai	Amr Youssef
Oner Dickensoy	Youssef Hokayem	Mohammad Malik	Ashish Rana	Huimin Yu

Many of our reviewers are new to this scholarly activity. We often provide guidance through previous editorials (3, 4). We are very proud of the role of JCHIMP in the professional development of novice reviewers. We should also complement our reviewers on the quality of their commentary and their dedicated volunteerism. We believe a critically constructive review improves a manuscript significantly.

We thank our sponsors who have included the Maryland ACP Chapter, Pennsylvania ACP Chapter, Reading Health, and, of course, our major sponsor, GBMC. We are very excited to announce that Reading Health will be taking the next step in 2016 of being a major sponsor of JCHIMP along with GBMC.

To balance our costs and minimize the financial burden to sponsors, the JCHIMP Editorial Board has voted to increase manuscript publication fees from $500 to $600, starting issue # 2, volume 6, 2016. Publication fees, institutional sponsorship, and individual donations are our revenue sources.

Also in this issue, we are publishing 16 additional manuscripts. There is a very important perspective piece on the graying of the HIV epidemic (5). There are two very interesting and helpful (for community hospital program directors) medical education papers: competency and the web log (6) and a well-detailed, step-by-step approach for increasing scholarly productivity in the community hospital setting (7). There is a clinical research study on predictive values of pulse pressures in sepsis (8).

The case reports are CHF associated with protease inhibitors (9); Kaposi’s sarcoma of the heart (10); 2 Takotsubo reports (11, 12); GI bleeding secondary to aortic cavitary fistula (13) in endocarditis with complete heart block; pulmonic valve endocarditis presenting as neck pain (14); tricuspid valve endocarditis with Mobitz II heart block (15); primary pulmonary leiomyosarcoma disguised as a pulmonary embolus (16); aspergillus endophthalmitis (17); cutaneous tuberculosis (18); and, finally, a report increasing our awareness of complications of acetaminophen overdose (19), and a review on GI bleeding and fistulas (20).

The sources of published manuscripts in this issue are Guthrie (PA), Maryland Midtown (MD), Presence St. Joseph (IL), Reading (PA), Highland (CA), Easton (PA), Pinnacle (PA), Bayview (MD), Jacobi (NY), Franklin Square (MD), Connemaugh (NY), Interfaith (NY), Providence (WA), GBMC (MD), and New Rochelle (NY).

Robert P. Ferguson, MD
Editor
Email: rferguson@gbmc.org