JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques: Celebrating 10 Years of Innovation

The ten-year anniversary of JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques comes at a dramatic time in medical history: technological innovations have enabled and improved the techniques for teaching surgeons, traditional print publications have yielded to online platforms, and real-time analytics are utilized to gauge viewer interest. We are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic that has highlighted the value of learning from each other, and opened new avenues for doing so remotely. As we announce the 2020 JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques Award winners, we celebrate the evolution and progress of the orthopaedic community and of our journal.

Over the past decade, we have seen continuous advancement in the quality of our peer-reviewed articles, which serve the important task of demonstrating surgical techniques with published outcomes. This year’s award winners continue that trend. Notably, the award-winning articles for both Subspecialty and Key Procedures focus on computerized navigation. In their Subspecialty Procedures article, Polly and Holton address the problem of sacroiliac joint pain, aptly performing arthrodesis with use of unique implants that result in less morbidity¹. In their Key Procedures article, Gothesen et al. produced an elegant treatise on the use of computerized navigation in total knee arthroplasty, showing how best to achieve optimal implant alignment, size, and positioning². These articles are sterling examples of how to utilize multimedia to demonstrate and articulate the fine details of a surgical procedure.

Since the inception of JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques, we have been steadfast in our mission to provide high-quality, peer-reviewed content that can be utilized as a teaching tool for surgeons at all levels of experience. We provide instructive video articles that describe the best and latest surgical techniques that are supported by published outcomes. As such, we continue to innovate within the journal and for our authors, including:

• Reducing burden by providing templates for articles and video storyboards

• Adding in-line video to the article text, as well as other multimedia to enhance viewer understanding of the procedure

• Migrating from a largely written article to an all-video, online format featuring an enhanced abstract

• Increasing learning efficiency by enabling variable playback speed for video viewing

• Adding English-language captioning to broaden outreach internationally and provide greater accessibility

When evaluating the impact of these changes, 1 metric to assess the value of an article is the interest that it generates. For that, we also present the top-10 most viewed JBJS Essential Surgical Techniques articles^3-12. Although the frequency with which a procedure is performed plays a role in the viewership metrics, all of these articles are outstanding examples of the high-quality content we aim to provide.

We will continue to push the envelope and lead by searching for and incorporating additional features as they become possible.