The Journal in 2006

This segment of the first issue of a new volume is traditionally used to trumpet the achievements of the preceding year and to anticipate those which we hope are to come. The Journal has undergone a gradual change over the past year. After the typeface was modernized and the index removed, no negative comment was received from the readership. The quality of submissions has steadily increased along with the volume of submissions, meaning that we are in the position of rejecting more material than ever before. It is ironic that one measure of success of an academic publication such as this is an increasing rejection rate, but this is a fact of medical publishing life. As a result of the surge in quality of submissions, the impact factor of this Journal increased by approximately 50% (compared with 2005) to 1.518. This now ranks this publication 35th of 105 general and internal medicine journals. As I have stated before, this may not be the only measure of the quality of a journal, but it is by far the most universally cited metric and many authors and institutions rely on it exclusively when selecting a destination for their work. It is important that we continue to improve in this area, increasing further our status among general medical journals. The hard-working editors and office staff want it, your College, which pays our bills wants it and I hope you, the readers, want it too. It is by offering your best work to this publication that this ever-moving target of excellence will continue to be approached. I would like to present here a number of significant papers that were published in the Journal last year. The Synergy website is able to tabulate the most widely read and cited articles in any given journal and year and although this will change with continued observation, at the time of writing, the most frequently read paper published in 2006 was the Clinical Perspectives article on Chronic Hepatitis B by Farrell and Teoh.1 Assessing the most frequently cited paper is a little more complex because of time lags between publication and citation, but at present, the top two cited papers in the history of the Journal are the Original Article by Viiala et al. on complications of colonoscopy2 and the antifungal guidelines of Slavin et al.3 Despite the short lag time, one paper published in 2006 has made it into the top 20 cited papers of last year. This was a submission from Japan from Hirano et al.4 looking at pulmonary involvement in autoimmune pancreatitis. One of the joys of working with a general internal medicine journal with global penetration is the sheer unpredictability of exactly what will be ‘flavour of the month’ at any given time and where it may have come from. The continuing challenge of how to produce 12 balanced issues across the entire spectrum of subspecialties of internal medicine continues to be met head-on and overcome by the Journal Manager, Virginia Savickis. The complete conversion to electronic submission and review in 2006 has not been without teething troubles and despite these difficulties, she has continued to populate each issue with just the right mix of interesting papers. Virginia deserves the thanks of all Fellows of the College for her ongoing dedication to the Journal over more years than she cares to be reminded of. One matter which caused a great deal of concern to all involved in medical publishing last year was the scandal surrounding the sacking of the editorial board of the Canadian Medical Association Journal as a result of a clash between the journal and its publisher.5 Although no specific comment was made in these pages at the time this event occurred, our board did express solidarity with its Canadian cousins. I am delighted to reassure readers that there has been no hint of such threat from our College to the Internal Medicine Journal. Rather, the contrary has occurred with encouragement in every possible way for us to continue to grow in quality in a completely free editorial environment. I remind prospective authors that the only mechanism for submitting manuscripts for publication is through Manuscript Central found at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/imj where you will be able to set up an account for life (if you do not have one already) and submit your best work to your Journal. Researchers will be aware of the need to have clinical trials registered before they can be reported. This Journal will not publish reports of any clinical trial which have not been registered and the instructions to authors will be updated to reflect this global trend. I hope by now that the first regular podcasts introducing each issue of the Journal have begun. This form of selective and repeatable broadcasting has found all sorts of audiences for all sorts of material. I encourage feedback to the editorial office of your thoughts on this experiment. I have aimed to introduce the contents of each issue to encourage a deeper examination of the papers and to hear from some of the key authors and editors. For those not familiar with this form of audio distribution, please do not be afraid. You do not need a portable music player (although they are the target device); your computer itself will suffice. The editorial board remains a vibrant and living organism. Again, we have seen several changes over the past year. At the end of 2005, Stella Milsom resigned as Endocrinology editor after more than 10 years of dedicated service and was replaced by Mark McLean who has settled into the chair very nicely. Susan Newton was replaced as Palliative Medicine editor by Janet Hardy and Geoff McCaughan (appointed 1991) resigned as Gastroenterology editor and will be replaced by Ian Norton. I thank all of the outgoing editors for the hard work and dedication and for their roles in the enhancement of this Journal and I certainly welcome the new folk with equal enthusiasm and optimism. Joe McCormack and Zoltan Endre continue in their roles as Deputy Editors-in-Chief for Australia and New Zealand, respectively. As I have pointed out before, these and the other specialty editors are highly experienced and qualified individuals who give up increasingly precious time to ensure the production of our Journal. The Editorial Board meets once or twice per year to set direction and to study matters requiring our attention as a group. I hope that the board members are aware of all of our thanks for their ongoing efforts. The immediate past Editor-in-Chief of this journal (Ed Byrne) deserves more than a passing mention. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia on Australia Day 2006 for service to neurology as a clinician and academic and to advances in medical research, particularly in the area of mitochondrial muscle disease. In late 2006, it was also announced that in late March, Professor Byrne will leave his current position as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Services at Monash University to take up the role of Executive Dean of the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences and Head of the Medical School at University College London. The Journal wishes him great success in this exciting new venture for him. Following this editorial is the list of individuals who have served as reviewers for submitted manuscripts during 2006. The task of reviewing is a by-product of expertise in a field. Those of you who do it, give up time and effort to help your fellow authors and your Journal maximize their performance. Although early viewing of potential competitors’ work may seem a reward for this activity, few reviewers see it as rewarding for that reason. Rather, they focus on the task at hand to consider, critique and suggest in positive ways. If you feel you have expertise that has not been used in this way, please send your details to the editorial office for forwarding to the appropriate specialty editor. I give my thanks once again to the individuals named below and I hope to see the list grow annually. Once again, I invite you, the readers, to join us in the Journal for 2007, a year, which should see it continue to prosper and grow.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.