**Transcript of Cyberseminar**

**Timely Topics of Interest**

**Publishing in the High-Profile Literature**

**Presenter: Edward H. Livingston, MD**

**November 14, 2012**

**Publishing in the High-Profile Literature**

**November 14, 2012**

Moderator:And as we are now approaching the top of the hour, I would like to introduce our presenter for the day. We have Dr. Edward H. Livingston presenting for us. He is the Deputy Editor for Clinical Content for the Journal of the American Medical Association. He is also a professor of surgery at University of Texas Southwestern School of Medicine and a professor of biomedical engineering also at the University of Texas in Arlington. So at this time I would like to turn it over to you, Dr. Livingston. You will see a popup on your screen that says “Show my screen.” Go ahead and click that button. Sorry. One second here. Okay. We are set if you just want to go – perfect. Thank you.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:All right. You can all hear me okay now?

Moderator: Yep.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Okay. Well, I would like to thank you for having me on your Cyber seminar. For those of you that do not know me, you see my title here. I am full-time deputy editor for JAMA. But to let you all know, I am deeply embedded in the VA. I spent a good part of my career in the VA dating all the way back to medical school and spent six years as a service line director for the GLA healthcare system, the service line for surgery.

You ask yourself, as an academic where do you want to publish and there are three major journals with very high impact factors that are quite competitive. The New England Journal of Medicine, our Journal, JAMA, and Lancet. And these are the big three of the general medical journals. 

They are distinguished by impact factor and circulation. Academic people tend to focus on the impact factor. The New England is in the 50s, about 53. Ours is 30. Lancet is about 38. Those numbers kind of come and go and I can talk about that later.

Our circulations, though, our readership are quite a bit different. Lancet circulates to about 35,000 people, the New England to about 110,000 and JAMA to 310,000; and we get about a million unique web browsers to our website a week. So we have the largest readership of the three journals although our impact factor is a little bit less. So it is a very, very influential journal.

I apologize for these slides. I realized when I put this slide together that I included some for talks I gave to surgeons about trying to get them to publish in JAMA. So we will just skip that one.

What do we want? So the big journals are all vying with one another for randomized controlled trials. That is the coin of the realm for us. Many of you in the VA are doing them through your Cooperative Research Program and that is – because they are so definitive and they are so important, that is what we really want to see in the journals. 

We do publish other kinds of article types, meta-analyses, other kinds of observational studies that may be practice-changing or other important discoveries on a more basic scientific level.

But quite frankly, everybody has their measure that they have to look after to maintain their reputation. For us in the journal business, it is citations and impact factor and readership. So we are always looking at papers and how they are going to be cited; how they are going to be read; how they are going to influence the practice of medicine. So that is how we prioritize things. But the bottom line is randomized controlled trials are what we are really after.

And I cannot advance here.

I am sure that most of the people on the call are in the medical specialties, not the surgical specialties, and you certainly see a lot of randomized controlled trials done in cardiology, oncology and GI. And I have some references here in terms of—these are again oriented towards surgeons—but for all of you, the User’s Guide to the Medical Literature is extremely helpful and they are available either in the User’s Guide website, which is sponsored by McGraw-Hill or you can search them and get them through JAMA itself. And the User’s Guide has a lot – covers a lot of the material I am going to talk about today and the kinds of things that we look for in the Journal.

It was really spearheaded by one of our editors, Drummond Rennie, who was constantly working with authors trying to help them develop better papers. He used to be with the New England Journal of Medicine. He came to work for JAMA a long time ago and he really spearheaded this effort. So if you are looking for information about how to set up a trial or how to do a statistical analysis or how to report your findings, I would look through these various users’ guides. They are very, very helpful.

Meta-analyses are something that we had a reputation of not publishing. I believe the New England does not publish them. We limited ourselves to about four to six a year until I took over as clinical editor and now actually I am fairly interested in publishing these. So we invite you to send them to me. But they do have to be done very rigorously. You have to follow the various guidelines for doing these kinds of meta-analyses. And the VA, the four VA-Evidence-based Centers do this really, really well, so I am assuming a lot of the ones that we get from you will fit these standards. But we are looking at meta-analyses and the systematic reviews much more aggressively now than we did at JAMA in the past.

What kinds of studies are we not interested in? Logistic regression of administrative data. I cannot tell you how many of these papers I get per day, and everybody has got a database. Everybody seems to know how to use logistic regression. I do not think very many people actually understand it. But they use it and they send us papers. And it is just really not very helpful and something that we are not all that interested in.

Volume outcome studies also—if you can send us a study that says why the volume impacts outcome, we would be interested in it. But just to display the association is no longer of interest to anybody.

Single center studies, because they are not necessarily generalizable are something that we put less emphasis on, unless there is something really compelling. The same thing goes for case series and retrospective studies.

And we at JAMA are particularly sensitive and have a reputation for conflicts of interest and we are very careful about authors who have obvious conflicts of interest.

So this is how the journal is organized from the masthead. No one actually looks at the masthead, but here it is. You can see in green who the chief – who the in-house players are. These are the people based in Chicago. Howard Bauchner is our editor-in-chief. The executive editor has oversight over a lot of things and is Phil Fontanarosa. The deputy editors all have their own sphere of influence. You can see me up there in green and I am in charge of clinical, which is about two-thirds to three-quarters of the Journal. 

And then Annette Flanagin is just the managing editor, who is that same person that you see on TV about newspapers who is running around beating you on the head about deadlines and stuff like that. And she makes the machine run. We come out every week and it is an immense amount of pressure to put out a journal every single week with the kind of content that we have.

To give you a sense of what my sections are, these are also outlined in green. So I have primary responsibility for Clinician’s Corner; Clinical Reviews, which include meta-analyses and things like that; Clinical Challenge; A Piece of My Mind. I do the poetry, which is strange. For those of you who know me, I am not really a poet. Patient Pages and the cover and all kinds of things. So these are all aligned under Clinical in JAMA.

In terms of publishing – so I was like all of you. I was an investigator. I was in the VA. I eventually became the surgical editor for JAMA several years ago and now I am full-time clinical editor. And I have learned about publishing from both sides of the business. 

And it is a business. We sell journals. We have to come out every week. And it operates much like a business, and business is about relationships.

You need to get to know the editors. We are people. We are just like you. Many of us started out in academics and then migrated into this career pathway. And the bottom line is that we tend to publish people that we know. We tend to publish people that we trust, especially at JAMA where the stakes are very high for papers. People will be disingenuous to us and we are very careful about that. So we have an overt bias of publishing people who we know. So it is good to get to know us.

How do you get to know us? Do the right thing. When we ask you to do reviews, please do them. Do them well and give us lots of insights and interact with us, and that is how we get to know people. And then generally when I am looking for people to write things, I will go to people who have done these reviews and done them well to be authors for JAMA. 

So that is the key, is connecting with us, getting to know us. We try to make ourselves as available as possible. And when we work together on reviews and editorials and other kinds of things, eventually that works up to accepting primary research papers.

JAMA is unique amongst the journals in stability. A lot of journals have rotations where the editor-in-chief has a five-year time period or something like that. That is not the case at JAMA. The people in Chicago are full-time. Most of them have been with the organization more than 15 years. Howard and I are unique in that we are – Howard came to us a year ago, our editor-in-chief, Howard Bauchner. I have been with the Journal for several years but full-time just since July. But almost everybody I work with has been there for there – one of the women that works under me has been there 35 years. So there is a lot of stability.

The reason they do that is that we want to develop relationships with our authors and our readers and we want everybody in the field to know who we are. And we want to know who you are, again because it is all about relationships. So that is the JAMA philosophy.

For example, in surgery, the surgical community should know that I have been the surgical editor. I still remain the person principally in charge of surgical papers and that if you wanted to talk to me about publishing in JAMA about something surgery, you could reach out to me and talk to me about it. Now my span is everything clinical, so I do provide that availability for potential authors.

I was told this when I first came to JAMA: it does not seem like it, but we are in the business of publishing your papers. Because like so many of you, I have – I actually now have one of my favorite rejection letters from JAMA on my wall in my office at JAMA that was signed by one of my co-editors. And I got him to update that letter just a few weeks ago.

How do we move papers through JAMA? This is important to know how we process papers, because it is a little different. The New England and us do it pretty much the same. Most journals do it somewhat differently. This slide is a little dated. We get now probably 6,000 to 8,000 manuscripts a year. The acceptance rate for research manuscripts is four percent. The overall acceptance rate for all kinds of submissions is about nine percent.

We get lots of everything. We receive 1,000 poems per year for the 48 that we publish per year. We publish about 4 major research papers per week. The goal for us to publish is one major clinical review or other kind of clinical-type paper and one shorter type thing like our Clinical Challenge series every week. And those are things that I work on a weekly basis.

When the papers come in, they are all distributed by one of the full-time deputy editors and he looks at them. He rejects some off the top if they just do not have a chance and then distributes them to our specialty contributing editors. 

We have about 20 contributing editors. They each have a specialty. There is one for renal. There are a couple of cardiologists. There is an oncologist. There is a pulmonary/critical care editor. And so they will get distributed to that editor. That editor has complete and independent discretion to handle the paper from that point forward. About half the papers that they get are rejected without review right off the top.

If they get sent out for peer review, we require two content experts to review the paper and one statistical review. And all papers that need statistical review, get statistical review before they get published in JAMA.

Once it has been reviewed, that editor brings the paper and its reviews to our biweekly editors’ meeting where we all sit around the table and invite the outside contributing editors in by conference call and discuss all the papers of the day. There can be generally six to ten papers that we talk about at these meetings.

If the paper looks promising and has favorable reviews, then we send it for an internal review process that gets circulated amongst the in-house editors for a process we call “editorial review before revision,” and then send it back to the authors for revisions. If the paper has gotten that far, it has a very high likelihood but no guarantee of being published. If we think a paper is a serious enough contender that we spend time amongst the in-house editors looking at it in detail, then it has a good chance of being published. So if you take those comments seriously and fix the paper in the ways we think it needs to be fixed, it has a high likelihood of being accepted.

What about paper structure? This is an exceedingly important point and it is amazing how often we struggle with authors on this issue.

Papers need to be brief. And we recognize that everybody has a lot to say about their favorite topic, but not everybody can read a 5,000-word manuscript. Our research manuscripts are limited to 3,000 words, and there are certain types of papers that we will reject just because there are too many words. We just cannot deal with them if they are too long.

And so you need to be very succinct. You need to be highly accurate in your writing. And you need to be brief.

The abstract: we have an abstract format that you need to follow. One good way to get rejected at JAMA is to have the paper come in with the Medicine’s format. And we know it has been there. We do not mind that it has been there. But if you cannot be bothered to fix the format, especially—we see, I see this probably every few months, someone will write “Dear Dr. Drazen, we would like to submit this paper to JAMA for publication.” That is an automatic rejection and we will not let you fix that. 

Another thing that is very important is that when you write, we have a section that we require called “Context.” Please, please, please make sure that you write in the Context what is the clinical question that this paper is all about. That is what the Context section is for. We want to know how is it that this paper fits into the clinical world and why it is important.

And the Conclusion needs to follow the data. It is somewhat surprising and disheartening how many times we will see conclusions that have no bearing on the data. And it is quite obvious that the authors have a message that they are trying to communicate and there are some authors, even some well-known authors, that we struggle with all the time who just do not seem to find the need to have their conclusions actually be supported by their data. So make sure there is a logical sequence between data analysis and conclusion.

The Introduction, a very common thing we tell authors, is cut back on the introduction. It should be 300 words, at most 350 words. It should have three paragraphs. The first paragraph ought to be introduction to the major topic. 

I am an obesity surgeon. I really have no interest in papers that start the first paragraph with how many people are obese, the fact that obesity is on the rise. Everybody knows that. We do not need to hear it again. You want a very short paragraph that tells about your particular piece of that topic and how is it that what you are working on is going to influence things.

The second paragraph should talk about how your study is going to address that topic that you introduced in the first paragraph.

And the third paragraph explains exactly what you are going to do and absolutely should include the word “hypothesis.” If you are not doing a study that has a hypothesis, it is not a study, and then it is not really a research report. So make absolutely certain that you place things in the context of a study hypothesis.

The methods should be sufficiently detailed so that others can repeat your study.

The results should be presented with confidence intervals or IQRs. Please, please, please do not send us papers that only have point estimates. A point estimate is impossible to interpret unless you know the variability around that point estimate, and we absolutely require it. We will not publish papers that do not have that kind of information. So it makes it much easier for us to interpret the importance of your findings if you have the confidence intervals.

There are some papers that come in where we know the authors are just hiding the confidence intervals and they usually do not make it very far at JAMA.

The Discussion should be highly focused. It should not be a graduate thesis. It should be about 500 to 800 words and very, very focused in terms of how your study has fit into the clinical paradigm that you are studying and how it changes things. And how your findings will change clinical thought.

We limit papers to five tables or figures. They should be visually appealing and very simple. And the figure and table legends are really, really important and people do not pay enough attention to this. Because figures and tables will be looked at in isolation to the paper, they should stand on their own. So you should write a figure or legend that explains exactly what that figure or legend is showing in some detail, so that anybody looking at it can understand what it is you are trying to communicate without having to read your paper.

References should be complete. Please spend some time looking at the literature. It is always very, very distressing when people do incomplete literature searches in the modern era where there is so much information easily available to investigators. And you can rest assured that we will send your papers to content experts, and if you have not referenced their key papers, they will view your paper very unfavorably. Frankly, it will piss them off, and it will be very hard to get past that.

So please be careful about how you reference things. Make sure that you have looked at all the previous literature. This is important because when people do not do that, we find sometimes that they have done studies that are repeats of other studies that are out there; they just were not very careful about setting up their research question, and that does not help anybody. So be careful.

But you do not want to over-reference. The maximum amount of references we allow is 75.

One of the things that gets people a lot at JAMA and The New England and Lancet and the other journals that take this very seriously is trial registration. And it is important to know that a trial that needs to be registered is anything that involves an intervention on a patient. That is the definition: if it involves an intervention.

So I had a few things come up in this last year. There was someone who did a behavioral intervention and they assumed that trial registration was only for drug interventions and did not think behavioral interventions actually counted as interventions, even though behavioral interventions is explicitly stated to be an intervention in the rules that govern such things in the ICMJE, and did not register their trial. It did not get published.

Similarly, I have seen people submit QA interventions. So we did a quality thing. If they do that prospectively, it counts as an intervention. We changed the policies and procedures or the way nurses interact with patients on this ward in a cluster randomized trial. That is an intervention, even though it may be a Quality Improvement project.

So if it involves an intervention in care, it has to be registered. And the trial needs to be registered *before* patients are actually enrolled. Not randomized. Enrolled.

So that is really important. We lose a lot of papers at JAMA because of mistakes made about trial registration. We take this very seriously at JAMA. There are very few exceptions, and if we do grant exceptions, it is through a very tedious process that we make authors go through. So be very careful about registering your trials.

Study power is another common pitfall. We look at this very carefully. We want to make sure that studies are adequately powered. But more than just that you say that you powered it, you have to defend your assumptions in that power calculation. If you say there is a standard deviation for some measurement, you have to cite where that came from, where the reference is, and you have to define what – when you say something is a minimal clinical important difference, you have to defend why that number is the MCID. We all know that you can create an MCID. You can create a large number which would require a fairly small number of patients. It cannot be arbitrary. You have to say why the number you picked to be your MCID is actually the minimally clinically important difference.

Another problem we have is inadequate study design, whether it is an equivalence, superior, or noninferiority trial. If you are doing a trial, it has to fit into one of these categories. 

We recently published a huge trial which should have been a definitive trial of PPI’s versus laparoscopic [inaudible] in a very large-scale multi-center trial from Europe where they actually did not have a study design, so we could not actually call it a randomized controlled trial. We had to call it a preliminary study.

So be careful with this. There are some references I will give you in a second about how to understand these terms and how to set up your trials and power them for these particular designs. I will not belabor the details in the interest of time. The references are in the slide deck where you can go to find out a lot of detail about this.

This is a reference that I send to a lot of the authors telling them this is how we want to see this data structured in terms of how to set up noninferiority and equivalence trials. 

This is how we like to see the data presented. This little slide explains when inferiority boundaries cross, do not cross and when you have reached significance or not; and it is very, very helpful in terms of interpreting the study.

And also you need to clearly identify your primary outcome variable. That should be stated in your clinical trial registry and your study should be wrapped around the primary outcome variable. That is a singular term. Prime means one. You cannot have five primary outcome variables. There is going to be one primary outcome variable, which is what your study is powered to, and then you can have all the secondary variables you want.

We will not allow emphasis on secondary outcomes. We sometimes publish entire papers on secondary outcomes depending on if they are important or interesting enough. Sometimes they actually are more interesting than the primary analysis. 

But as a general proposition, make sure your study is wrapped around and emphasizes the primary outcome variable with secondary emphasis on secondary outcomes.

Be careful with your study protocols. We are going to ask you for and we are actually considering requiring as a part of manuscript submission the actual study protocol, the one that was printed and accepted by the IRB before the study was proposed. I have had the unfortunate experience of having major inconsistencies between these protocols and the resulting papers not being published. 

So be very careful with that protocol and make sure that you follow it to the letter and that your paper is entirely consistent with that protocol because we will review it.

When you are doing your statistics, make sure that your statistical differences are clinically important, not just statistically different. And we would like to know the justification for why you think something is clinically important. 

And if you are doing pharma studies, JAMA is unique in that we will ask for independent statistical review. And we only publish the results of the independent reviewer, not the drug company’s analysis.

Follow the rules. I am sure you have all heard these kinds of talks from people who give grants and from editors. So I will tell you the same thing. I remember when I was an assistant professor being told the same thing. Follow the instructions. It is amazing how many times people do not follow the instructions. 

And we have our reasons for our instructions. They have evolved over time for reasons. And so if you do not follow them, we will reject just on that basis alone. And sometimes that can be a fairly harsh thing. But make sure you do it.

We all understand that papers circulate. Sometimes a paper on a second or third iteration through various journals is much better than the original one. We do not have a problem with that, but we absolutely need for you to have addressed the prior journal’s critiques. We will ask you for those critiques, and if you have not made the changes that were suggested, we will not publish the paper.

And it is also good to disclose that you have sent the paper elsewhere first, because it is also somewhat embarrassing for authors when we get a review back from a reviewer that says, I rejected this paper from Lancet and this is why. And then we will come back to you and say, we want to see those Lancet reviews. And as I mentioned, if you did not address those concerns but just simply turned it around and submitted it to us, we will not take it.

Some statistical issues. These are very important and recurring. Actually, we deal with this all the time at the Journal. It was nice to see that the Institute of Medicine took on the issue of missing data and they published a nice review in the New England Journal of Medicine about a month ago about how to deal with missing data. This is a big deal. And we make the authors address these issues.

We do not accept eliminating observations because there are missing data points. Or if you do a regression, one of the common things is to eliminate entire groups of people who are missing individual observations of data points, and we do not allow that.

We prefer and will actually require that you do multiple imputation for that kind of problem. We do not accept last observation carried forward. We require first observation carried forward if you are going to do a sensitivity analysis for missing outcomes data.

So this is stuff we used to spend a lot of time with, with authors. But now this New England review pretty much covers it and all the things they recommended are things we have been telling authors for years. So be very careful about this.

Propensity matching has become very popular. It has actually gotten kind of overboard. Now people are propensity matching everything. But we tend not to believe logistic regressions on their own. You do a logistic regression supposedly to adjust for various covariates. That turns out that that is not necessarily complete. There is a series of papers showing why that is not really the case. So most of the time we require, when you are doing this sort of observational study, a propensity score. Usually I prefer a waiving from a propensity score rather than an actual match. You lose a lot of power with the matches. 

But this paper explains what that is all about and also has a nice display of how we like to see the data shown. We like to see the various covariates and what they looked like before the match or adjustment and then after the match adjustment to see how well you have been able to balance the groups by your propensity analysis.

Other common statistical pitfalls are multiple comparisons. We will ask you to account for this. Do alpha adjustments if you are doing a lot of comparisons. It is really common these days in big observational studies to see a gazillion comparisons and we will make sure that you have accounted for that particular problem.

Regression-elimination procedures and backward elimination in logistic regression is very common, but in point of fact there are problems with those elimination procedures, even though they’re widely available on SAS and everybody uses them. I do not think most investigators understand the limitations of the elimination procedures because of the complex interactions between variables of order. Order becomes important. So one of our statisticians will always ask you, how did you pick the order in which things got eliminated? And most people do not have an answer for that.

This is sort of the multiple comparison problem. You just keep looking for a P value. When you find it, it becomes a front page of the newspaper.

Another problem we see with randomized controlled trials is early stopping. There is a whole series of papers in JAMA about problems with early trial cessation, and you need to have an interim analysis and you have to have coherent stopping rules. And it is in your best interest when you design your trial to come up with a system that will keep data safety monitoring boards from capriciously stopping your study. So you need to be very careful about how you plan these things because they have a very low threshold to stop studies and you wind up expending a lot of effort and get nothing at the end of it because it gets stopped too early.

Who gets published? So you will see some authors over and over and over again in JAMA. And I can tell you because I can look at their track records on my system. There is about a 10:1 reject ratio, reject-to-accept ratio for those authors. So even people who you think publish a lot, they submit a lot of stuff to us. So just keep submitting. But do not keep submitting in futility.

So there is one author who sent me the typical logistic regression of an observational study. I rejected a few of his papers. He called me, interestingly enough, to tell me that I did not understand that he needed a JAMA publication to get promoted to professor. And at the time I was a division chief and I understood the process quite a lot and explained to him he did not understand that that was not JAMA’s problem.

I get a paper from this guy every three months and I have for the last three years with the same logistic regression/observational data. When I see his name I reject the papers. They are never any different and he did not listen to a word that I told him when I talked to him on the telephone that that is just not something that we are interested in.

And so if you go through this and you get papers that are rejected and you go to the trouble of talking to an editor, LISTEN to their advice and take it to heart.

The other thing that we have noticed, a trend from a group of authors was that they keep resubmitting the same paper. We just kind of figured this out that they take the paper, it gets rejected, they repackage it, put a different title on it and resubmit it. And we actually found one of these papers got accepted. So now we are actually watching this group very carefully and have rejected the last two papers from them.

But you have to be careful. If we say no, it means no. And so just trying to repackage, appeal, scream, yell, shout, throw tantrums just do not work. And the more that you do that, the less likely we are to publish you in the future.

Writing is hours in the saddle. It is amazing how many prominent investigators from prominent institutions cannot write. We are sensitive to it as editors because you become an editor because you have a knack for it and that is something you are interested in doing. 

A lot of investigators have variable abilities to write. But I can tell you all those people who know me, especially my wife—and I learned this at the VA—I learned how to write at the VA. I could not write when I started in this business at all, and now I do it well enough to be an editor at a big journal. It takes practice. And I wrote a lot. So you just have to keep doing it. It is hours in the saddle.

You have to go through multiple drafts. There is nobody on this planet who gets the perfect paper the first time they write it down. And one rule of thumb – there are a couple rules of thumb. One is, get over the writing hump, which means some people get writer’s block. They cannot seem to get their ideas on paper. Just write something. Get it written from beginning to end. It may be absolutely terrible, but just get it down on paper. Do not worry about quality in the first draft but also do not show the first draft to any other human being.

So take your first draft and rewrite it a second time. The second draft should always be written with about ten percent less content at least from the first draft. So when you are going through the second draft, think about how you are going to reduce the content. And with each successive iteration, ask yourself how can you make this writing more efficient and more compact with each revision.

And then after a revision or two then you can show it to other people and get their sense for it. And it is very important to show your writings to other people because you get too close to your own writing. And so you have to have somebody else say, this makes sense; this does not make sense. You need to take their advice.

And so writing is an iterative process. You need to just keep writing and rewriting and editing and re-editing. And then also just writing all the time to become a better writer.

I mentioned this before. When you resubmit, address every point with editors and reviewers. You do not have to agree with everybody. We understand that there may be conflicting recommendations from peer reviewers and whatnot. That is okay. We all know that. You just have to explain why it is you did what you did or why you did not do what you did. Just to say, we do not agree with this or to eliminate or just to not even discuss a particular point an editor or an author raised, then your papers just will not get accepted. So you have to address everything. Even if you disagree with it, you have to give a cogent argument for why you disagree with it.

Do not argue with peer reviewers. Just do not do it. It does not make sense. Even though the editors are somewhat neutral, it is really lethal to argue with an editor. I can tell you that. We are human beings. We do not like being argued with, like any other human being. But peer reviewers—we pick them because we think they know what they are talking about. So if you write back and say, well, that reviewer clearly does not have a clue about this topic, then that is not going to work. 

I just went through this with two peer reviewers going after one another. I had two very famous economists review a paper and one economist said, obviously, this other reviewer knows nothing about economics. And it was just hilarious to read. So just do not do stuff like that. Just do not argue with people.

You can disagree and explain why. But like I said, it is a bad idea to argue with the editor. And do not be afraid to contact us directly.

So I would like to thank you all for listening to me. I would thank you even more for submitting papers to JAMA and its journals.

Just as an aside, we are a network of journals. January 1, the sister journals change names. As you all know, the Archives are part of the JAMA family, Archives of Surgery, Archives of Internal Medicine, Archives of Psychiatry, Neurology, all those other nine journals. They on January first become JAMA Neurology, JAMA Medicine, JAMA Psychiatry to reinforce the concept of a network.

Our ten journals reach more than half the physicians in the U.S. There is no other set of journals quite like it. We have just amazing reach with these ten journals. I didn’t talk about it, but we have a process that we are going to streamline next year. We have it now where if you submit a paper to JAMA and it does not quite make it into JAMA and we think it is more appropriate for one of the JAMA network journals, we can forward it internally. It does not require resubmission. The editors of those journals are independent and they may ask for more peer reviews in addition to what we have at JAMA. Some do, some do not. And you can have a paper get accepted to one of the sister journals with very little overhead on your part.

We are going to streamline that where when you submit to JAMA there will be a checkbox where you can say, If not accepted by JAMA can we automatically send it to this other journal? So we can make it easier for you to get published. And again, the advantage of publishing in the network is that our network reaches a huge 440,000 to 450,000 physicians who read one of the JAMA network journals. And that is about half the physician workforce in the US.

So with that I will conclude. This is my contact information. Keep it, write it down. Email me. If you do not hear—I get a lot of emails a day, so if you do not hear from me, it is not that I do not like you. It is just that I may have lost track of your email because they just come very quickly. So if you do not hear from me for a couple days, just send another email. Or call me. Calling me does not work too well because I am not always sitting at the phone. But email works great. And with that, I will conclude and entertain any questions or comments.

Moderator:Okay. Thank you very much, Dr. Livingston. We do have several questions that have come in, so we will get right to it. The first one: Would rigorous, comparative effectiveness studies be of interest to JAMA?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Yeah, it is. In fact, we had an entire issue devoted to comparative effectiveness. But be careful with the verbiage because it is a very popular term. It may make it sound sexy to granting agencies but every time somebody does a comparison between Group A or Group B, they now call it comparative effectiveness. So we have actually been talking at JAMA as what we are going to define comparative effectiveness as ... because that term is used very loosely. So do not think that just because you call it comparative effectiveness in your title that it is actually going to be of any interest to us just because of that word. So if it is true comparative effectiveness, whatever that means, yes, we are interested. But do not over-estimate the impact of that particular term. It does not really mean a heck of a lot to us.

Moderator:Thank you for that reply. The next question: Do you publish qualitative research?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Well, it depends on what you mean by qualitative. If it is a very interesting observation, we might do that. I did a news piece on some qualitative information that I saw presented at a meeting that was just sort of an interesting observation about patient experiences with a particular intervention. We might. You never know what we are going to do. We do not have anything that we say we will not do—well, we do have. We will not do animal studies. We will not do most basic science research, although we occasionally publish something that is really, really interesting in basic science research. But as a general proposition we will not do animal studies. But if it is a clinical study and it relates to clinical medicine, we might. You never know. So the best thing to do is either send an email and say, are you interested in this? Or just send in a submission. 

And – we reject things very quickly if we are not going to. We do not let them sit around forever. So if we are not going to publish it, we reject it right away, which some authors find annoying because they think that they have not really gotten a fair shot at things. But in point of fact it is better for you because if we know we are not going to publish it, we just reject it and everybody can move on.

Moderator:That actually is a great segue into the next question. What is the turnaround time?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:The mean turnaround time from submission to publication is 100 days. So JAMA is the fastest journal around in terms of getting things done. Our limit is usually the peer reviewers. They take a long time, but once it gets past peer review and it goes through our system, it goes through very quickly. But our mean time is 100 days.

Moderator:Thank you.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:And we do not have much of a backlog. So we – once we accept – so right now, this week we are accepting papers to be published in the end of December and beginning of January. And that is long for us. It is just we had a cardiology-themed issue with a gazillion papers and we are just catching up with all those papers we are publishing. But we are usually publishing things within about a month to six weeks after we accept them.

Moderator:Thank you. You stated that you are not interested in retrospective analyses. Would this still be the case when existing RCT might not apply to and usually exclude the general patient population? I am thinking in particular of a study of the effect of adjuvant treatment for resected non-small cell lung cancer.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Yeah. So there are no absolute exclusions. I will just tell you in the hierarchy of studies that we look for, we take RCTs very seriously. We will look at observational studies. We obviously publish a lot of observational studies. But for each one we publish, we probably get 20 submissions. So if they are addressing important issues, like the one, the example that was just given, yes, we will do that. Sometimes we have these enormous databases which provide interesting information about outcomes. For example, randomized trials are limited. They only give you a good sense of the positive impact of a primary outcome variable. They tell you very little about secondary problems like complications. So sometimes the best assessments of treatment complications are from secondary analyses and retrospective reviews, not from RCTs. So yes, we do publish them. But I said what I said because it is fairly easy to get a database and do a statistical analysis and submit a paper to JAMA. Because people do a lot of that. And we reject an enormous number of those papers seeking the few truly important, truly interesting observational studies.

So my advice to investigators is, do not follow that path of ease of just getting a database and grinding out some data. I mean there are some groups that – I call them factories. They take data, they put them through their machine, it spits out a few automatic analyses. They always do the same analysis the same way and they spit out papers. And those papers are generally not very interesting.

So there is no general rule in terms of we just will not publish XYZ. But be certain you are doing some analysis that is interesting and important before sending it to us.

Moderator:Thank you for that reply. The next question: You mentioned trials should be registered. Where should they be registered?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:In the U.S., the best place is clinicaltrials.gov. You just go to the website and anybody can register anything. It is really easy to do. Some granting agencies will do it for you, like NIH, NCI. A few other groups do it. But I would be careful about that because they sometimes do not get it right. So sometimes we have to go in circles with authors to track down the trail where someone at the NCI was supposed to register it and they did not do it or they did not follow up on it, it did not get done right. So it is very important for you to make sure that that gets done, because we take it very seriously. So. But you just go to clinicaltrials.gov and you can register things.

Moderator:Thank you. If I have an NIDDK funding, is the study automatically registered?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:No. Well, it is supposed to be. But do not count on it. So NIH, as I mentioned just before, NIH says they will register things. But that does not always happen and does not always get done right. So you have to make sure that it is done. It is easy to find out if it is done because before you enroll your patient, you can look at clinicaltrials.gov and see that it is there. And you can see what date it was put on clinicaltrials.gov. That is the date we use. And that date does not change. It never changes. So there is a date that it was put on and it was registered. So before you do anything, you should make sure that it is there. If it is not, you should go to your contacts at the NIH to make sure it gets done right.

Moderator:Thank you. Would you – can you share the reference from the New England Journal of Medicine you mentioned that covers statistical matters like last observation carried forward, et cetera?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:I would have to look it up. It was published about a month ago. I could find that reference for you and email it to you. But it is very recent and there are two reports. There was an editorial and a report from some authors who are part of the institute committee, Institute of Medicine Committee looking at I believe something in the title was “Attrition.” Something about attrition, study attrition and how to deal with it statistically.

Moderator:Thank you. I suggest that if that person cannot find it after doing a search that they contact you offline. Can you also provide the article on “Weighted Propensity Analysis versus Matched Propensity”?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:So everybody has their own philosophy about this. My particular preference is that I like to see a weighted propensity, meaning that you do your – you develop a propensity score and then you enter that score as a variable in a regression. I prefer that over a propensity match. We try to match with some degree of precision based on propensity scores. The problem with matching is that you lose a lot of data. You lose a lot of power. So I think it is best to just do a score and use it as a variable in your regression. You can use that weighting to weight the covariates and show them in a table to see how that score will affect – how that score’s weight will affect the covariates and come up with the same kind of table like I had in the slide deck, which was a propensity match. But as a general proposition, you are better off with a score rather than a match.

Moderator:Thank you. We do have two of our researchers that wrote in with what they believe are the articles referred to from NEJM. The first is titled, “The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials,” and that was published in the 367th issue. And the second one is “A Special Report for the Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials.” So it looks like the same titles.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Those are it.

Moderator:Right. So now people can go ahead and access those. So thanks to the people who wrote in with that information.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Yep.

Moderator:Where is it not possible to design ...

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:By the way, since we all know, the VA ... what were you going to say?

Moderator:Oh, no, go ahead. I just was going to go on with the next question.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:I was just going to tell you, the VA just signed a contract with JAMA and you should all—I am not sure if it is done yet—but you should all have availability for all of JAMA and I believe all the back files for all of our ten journals at VA computers. So we came to an arrangement with the VA to make sure our content is available to all practitioners in the VA system.

Moderator:That is [overlapping voice].

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Another reason to publish in JAMA.

Moderator:Thanks for mentioning that. The next question: Where is it not possible to design a randomized controlled trial such as evaluating different policies? Is JAMA or its sister journals interested in simulation modeling studies? If so, what is your advice on making those papers more publishable?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:So that is an opinion thing. There is actually one of the other deputy editors, his whole career path has been on decision modeling so he is really into that kind of modeling. I, being someone who spent a lot of years doing statistical analyses and being a hardcore clinician, spent 20 years doing surgery, have a very – I am very skeptical of mathematical models and that kind of modeling analysis. So there is divided opinion. So unfortunately for you, it depends on who you get as your editor. I tend to reject those papers. There is another one of us who really likes those things. So there is no firm answer on that. There are actually several editors who really like modeling studies. In fact at yesterday’s manuscript meeting we talked about a couple of them and they are moving forward. So there are people who really like them.

Moderator:Thank you. We are down to our last few questions. Before I get to them, I just want to say that many people have written in saying thank you for sharing your expertise, and a lot of people wrote in saying yes, we do have access to the JAMA articles and we appreciate it very much. So thank you.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Great. Okay.

Moderator:Next question: How does someone become a JAMA reviewer? Can anyone sign up to be considered as a JAMA reviewer? And the following question is: Is it valuable to the evolution of – oh, no, I am sorry. Just that one. How does someone become a JAMA reviewer?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Yeah, so the reviewers. I have had a few people after these talks write to me saying, I would like to be a reviewer, and we try to use them. We usually get reviewers based on what you have published in the literature. So if your name appears—it does not have to be in our journal. If we find that you are the expert on renal failure and you have published 15 papers on a particular topic in renal failure in the renal literature, we will find you and we will use you as a reviewer. So it is not so much that we – someone says – writes to me and says, I would like to be a reviewer, although we invite that. That is fine to do that. We tend to look at people who have published, so you should publish as much as possible even if those publications are in the less impactful literature. Get your name out there.

But then also when we ask you to review, actually do it and do it well. So we very much appreciate thoughtful, detailed reviews. We have some again prominent investigators who just will not do reviews. And I found one who is a very, very well-known investigator who publishes with us and sends us papers all the time, who on the 15th refusal to review a paper in a row, we actually wrote to that person and said, you will not publish in our journals anymore if you do not do reviews, period. And that person is now doing reviews. So we keep track of that and we know how many times you say no. 

And also when people do not put any effort into it and just say, this paper is fine. That is not what we are looking for. At JAMA when you do a review, we are not interested in the mechanics. We have an army of copy editors and people with masters’ in fine arts who look at wording and grammar and all that kind of stuff. That is not what we look for. We are looking for content.

So if you are the local expert on renal failure and we send you a renal failure paper, we want to know your thoughts about renal failure, not about if the colons are in the wrong place or the commas are not right. So other journals really depend on that because they do not have copy editors. But we want to know your expert opinion. And if you give us a detailed—it does not have to be 1,000 words long. But as long as it covers all the important issues and it is thoughtful, that will mean a lot to us and that gets you in good stead with us. And when you send us papers, we will, because you have put a lot of effort into that process, we will take you very seriously as a potential author.

Moderator:Thank you. This is a closely-related question, then, and may have the same answer. How can interested individuals become statistical reviewers?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Oh, if you have expertise, let us know because we are always looking for statistical reviewers. So you can just write to me and tell me what it is you are interested in doing and what qualifies you to do that kind of thing and we will put you on the list. We actually have a list of people we use for this purpose.

Moderator:And I also believe that answers the next question: Do you suggest people volunteer to be reviewers or do you have other ways of getting reviewers? Okay. Next question: Is it valuable to the evolution of evidence-based medicine to continue to exclude studies using real-world data?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:I am not sure what you mean, exclude studies based on real-world data. We do not necessarily exclude them. And I mentioned earlier we publish them, but we publish them—the acceptance rate for those papers is far less than for say a randomized trial because if there is real – we understand that it is important to publish real-world data. And if real-world data tells an important story, we will publish it. Look at the Journal. We publish lots of papers like that. 

But I caution investigators because of the sheer volume of meaningless analyses of these large databases that we receive to not go through the easy route. Logistic regression of an administrative database is the most common approach to research that I see as an editor and it is simplistic. People oftentimes do not understand the math that they are doing, do not understand the limitations, but we get huge volumes of these papers, thousands and thousands of submissions like that. So that is why I say what I say.

So it is not that we exclude that kind of analysis. But I would caution you to make sure that that analysis is actually important before you do it.

Moderator:Thank you. We are down to our last four questions and we do have a couple of hundred people still on the call. Are you interested in publishing long-term cost-effectiveness studies using simulation model?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Well, again, as I have answered earlier, the answer would be the same. Some of our editors like that stuff. I personally do not. I think there are serious validity problems because of the uncertainty of how you construct the models and how you get the variables and how reliable those variables are. So I personally am not enthusiastic about them. But as I mentioned before, there are other editors who like those things. Those editors tend to get those papers, not me. So that is okay. If you do not know, submit it. You will find out. 

And again as I said earlier, the nice thing about JAMA is if it is not going to fly, you are going to find out right away. So it is not like we are going to put it through peer review, sit down after three or four months and then tell you, this never had a chance. But we are not going to do that at JAMA.

So you can always submit it and see if – you just never know what people are going to like. So you just need to submit stuff and keep submitting. We do not mind submissions. That is what we are in the business of looking at submissions.

Moderator:Thank you. For rigorous, systematic reviews, do you also require protocol pre-registration?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:No. No. Some people talked about doing that, but we do not require that. We only require – the rules for trial registration are in our Information for Authors and then it also refers to a website called ICMJE, the International Committee on Medical Journal Editors, and the specifications for what does or does not need to be registered are laid out on those websites. But retrospective studies, database analyses, those kinds of things, do not require registration, nor do meta-analyses. Similarly, I think the BMJ just announced they’re going to require depositing data or making data publicly available. That is not something that we are ever going to do at our journal. So it is just registration of prospective studies that involve an intervention. Hello?

Moderator:I am sorry. My line was muted. I was saying a few more questions have come in. Do you have time to stay on and answer those?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:I have time if you do.

Moderator:Great. Thanks so much. Okay. The next question: Is there preferential publishing of medical professionals versus non-medical professionals, for instance, pharmacists?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:No. No, no, not at all. In fact, we do not necessarily pay any attention to that. And I have gotten some of the most interesting papers from nurses and PhD investigators. And in fact I am trying to get some pharmacists now to publish an editorial on this whole problem of medication safety in fungal meningitis because with all the discussion about the problem of unsafe medicines, there has been almost nothing in the press coming from the pharmacy community, and they are the experts. So yeah. In fact, if anybody on the call happens to have an expertise in pharmacy and pharmacy policy, send me an email, because we are looking for people to talk about that in the Journal. So you – absolutely we look for – we are interested in all kinds of authors. We do not have any particular bias of the authors’ backgrounds.

Moderator:Thank you. This person writes: I am just a beginner trying to do some analysis and get some research projects published. Do we need to have many publications under our belt to be a reviewer?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:No, not necessarily. Again, we tend to identify reviewers from PubMed. So we look whose name pops up. But if you write to me and I have got you in the database and something that I know you are interested in comes our way, we will send it to you. We do not have any particular bias that way. We just want somebody who understands the topic. 

So look at it this way: I am the clinical editor. I am a surgeon. I do not know very much about a whole lot of stuff that I am responsible for that gets published in the Journal. I know a lot about science. I know a lot about statistics. I know something about medicine. I practiced medicine for a long time. But I am not an expert on most of the things that come my way. So I very much rely on peer reviewers to provide the content expertise. And then once I have their content expertise, I can run with the rest of it.

So even if you are an assistant professor just starting your career, you may know a whole lot about a topic that is certainly a lot more than a journal editor, and we appreciate that. And we want to know from your expertise whether this paper is on the mark or not. So it really does not matter if you are young or old. If you know a lot about something, we are going to appreciate that. In fact, young people sometimes give us the best reviews because they are ambitious and they are interested and they are engaged. And us older folks kind of get burned out and just say, yeah, forget it. I’m not interested—no.

So, yeah, if you are young and you are interested, we are interested in hearing from you.

Moderator:Thank you. A lot of people like me, students and budding researchers, would like to do research and publish, but we hardly have data to publish meta-analyses, RCTs, et cetera. What advice would you give?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:So it is a ladder. You work your way up. So if you are a first-time investigator, you are not going to get funding to do a major multi-center randomized trial, but just keep writing about stuff. So you can do a meta-analysis. You can do that all by yourself. You do not need anybody to do it. You just have to have a protocol on a process and a librarian who can help you get the papers. And you can get some people to work with you to assess the papers. But you can do reviews and you can do all kinds of things. 

You can also do some of these studies that I was critical of, the logistic regressions of administrative databases. They may not be of interest to JAMA, but there are 10,000 other journals out there and they are always looking for content. So you always find a home for whatever it is that you write. 

You might write editorial pieces. I mean when I was a resident, I published in a journal called “Medical Hypothesis” just because I came up with an idea and it turned out there was a journal all about publishing ideas that do not require any data. And so you can always find something, some journal out there that will publish what it is you are interested in. So just keep writing. Yes, you will publish a lot of stuff that is not going to have a big impact. But you work your way up, and that is how you get known, just by having your name out there.

So just whatever you can think about writing, just write. Some people think they should only target the big journals, but they disappoint themselves. That is why I brought up the point that even the investigators who publish a lot with us have about a 10:1 ratio of rejection to accept. They just keep – they write a lot. And by the time they get older and senior, we take their stuff more seriously, but look at where these people publish early in their careers. It is all over the place. So just keep writing and publishing. You can always find something to write about and you can always find a place to publish it.

Moderator:Thank you. We are down to our last two questions: Is JAMA interested in publishing case studies of new, innovative treatments or are RCTs required?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:We generally do not do case studies. Again, there are a million journals that will, but we do not. So we will not publish those. We will wait for a more definitive trial.

By the way, there are venues in our journal that you can access. So we have a section called Clinical Challenge, which is a short section, things are about 500 words. It is basically like a picture or a clinical scenario or something as a quiz. And anybody could submit those. We do not really care who writes those because we look at the content. We look to make sure that the question is correct and the discussion is correct. And we get them from all over the place. So that is a good place to start if you are young and you do not have a track record and you want to get your name in JAMA. That is one way to do it. 

And we have another series like it coming out in the second quarter of next year called “Diagnostic Test Interpretation.” In fact, I am looking for content for that right now. So if you are interested, write to me. 

But that is where you would have a lab test and the question would be, how do you interpret it? And then there would be a series of questions and all of that. 

So look at the journal. Look at the Clinical Challenges and see if you want to write one of those. And it basically requires having a patient. The patient has to consent—that is one of the limiting features of these sections—but you need to get the patient’s consent, get the information and turn it into a Clinical Challenge.

This Test Interpretation thing is going to be just like Clinical Challenge, but instead of showing like an image or a picture or an x-ray, it will be an actual lab result. So it will be a photocopy of a lab report or an x-ray report or something like that. And we are very interested in getting those. I would like to have a portfolio of the test interpretation built up. 

We have not announced it, so you guys are hearing it first. So if you want to write those things, write to me and I will send you the details. 

Doing stuff like that is one way to get your name in front of everybody at JAMA and you do not have to have any experience for that. 

Another thing that – well, I will just stop there.

Moderator:Thank you. We do have one final question. Do you think that some people submit to high-impact journals to get a good review of their research so that they can try and plug in the holes and submit again to a different journal?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Yeah. Yeah, we see that. We actually welcome it because if you are willing to have it published in our sister journals, then we are willing to do the work to make it a better paper. And on the other hand, if you are using it to make it a better paper for one of our competitors, then the next time you submit, we may not take you very seriously. 

But yeah, for example, I came to JAMA from the Archives of Surgery. I was on their editorial board and I spent a lot of time trying to make papers good for the Archives of Surgery that started off in JAMA. And that is part of the family. So it is part of – I get paid to do this. So I am more than happy to put a lot of work into papers that will wind up in the Archives journals that are being processed in JAMA.

A lot of times we will even start out saying, we are not really sure if this is a JAMA paper or an Archives paper, but we will run it through our peer review. We will run it by our editors. And if in the end it winds up being not quite right for JAMA, we will send it to Archives. 

Being that this is how we do it and we are trying to formalize this when the names change, we would like a commitment from you upfront before we put all this effort into it to send it to one of the Archives for us to do this work. So because of our family, we are more than happy to do just what was said, to plug the holes and make it a good paper for one of our other journals.

Moderator:Thank you. That was the final question that came in. Nope, I spoke too soon.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:There’s actually something else I wanted to mention. Another thing to do are Grand Rounds. We have a section – we have Narrative Reviews and Grand Rounds. So even if you are not that experienced of an author, we have these new sections. Again, we have not published very many of them, but it is a big emphasis of mine for the next couple of years. 

So let us say you want to do a Narrative Review, and I can send you the protocol for this if you email me, on your favorite topic and it is of interest to us. So let us say for example I just – Joel Kupersmith gave me the name of an investigator in the VA and we were looking for someone to do something on cardiac stents. We wanted a Narrative Review on the Appropriate Indications for Cardiac Stents. So that person will write it.

We have a whole series of topics that we want to develop over the next couple of years. So even if you are an assistant professor and you have not published much but you know an awful lot about something, and that something is of interest to our primary care readership, a Narrative Review is one way to do it. You just have to do a systematic review of sorts, but any individual can do it.

Similarly, if you are doing a Grand Rounds, we have a section on Grand Rounds. We do not publish very many of them, but we would publish more if we got them. So if you are putting together a protocol for Grand Rounds and you can turn that into a paper for JAMA, then we might publish it. So that is another way to get into JAMA without having a lot of your own data from a prospective trial to do. So keep that in mind. There is an editor for that, Mary McDermott. But you can just write to me and I will be happy to work with you on those things. So those are other ways to get into the Journal.

So I showed you the cover earlier. Look through the various sections. Look at a couple weeks’ worth of JAMA and see the various sections. You will see there is a lot of stuff in there that people write to publish in JAMA that is not primary data. And all those sections are under me, by the way. So if you have an interest and you think of something you want to write about, just write to me and we will see if we can make it happen.

Moderator:Thank you. We do have two more questions that just came in. I am sorry if I missed this, but what makes a Narrative Review a “Narrative Review.”

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:So it is like a – I call it a systematic review light. So we have two different protocols for these writings. We have not published any Narrative Reviews yet, but we are soliciting them now. A Systematic Review is a formal systematic review. I think everybody knows what that is.

A Narrative Review is one that requires less rigor in the evidence acquisition. So it will be a topic that is relevant. Again, these topics are relevant to our primary care readers, our primary base are primary care providers. So you have a topic, let us say it is diabetic retinopathy and you want to write a review on diabetic retinopathy. So a Narrative Review would be I think 3,000 or 4,000 words, 50-75 references. But the key for a Narrative Review is a discussion of that one topic, which would be diabetic retinopathy, and a review on its treatment. A systematic review of its treatment.

So we will expect a table with treatment options and what the evidence is to support those treatment options.

Now, if there is a USPTF recommendation for that particular thing, that is all we need. You do not have to go back and re-create the reviews. So if there some major evidence generating body that everybody agrees with those recommendations, then that is all you need to do. You do not have to go digging through the literature yourself.

So because we have not published the protocol for this yet, but we are individually asking people to write these. Before we publish a call for an article type, we generally have a library of things ready to go before we actually let the world know we are doing it. So you guys are amongst the first to hear about this. And I am more than willing to work with authors. I would have to send you the protocol so you can see what it looks like.

Moderator:Thank you. We have one last question. Does JAMA have an interest in health reform? The New England Journal of Medicine seems to have a new focus on this policy issue.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Yes, we absolutely do. In fact, we are working with AcademyHealth to try to develop content. There was a time when JAMA was a major voice for health policy about 20-30 years agowhen George Lundberg was editor and then sort of migrated away from that the last ten years and now we are circling back. We have a relationship with AcademyHealth, which is a policy organization. A lot of people in the VA are involved with that. And in fact this Cyber Seminar started with meeting Seth Eisen at that meeting and he talked about this Cyber Seminar series. And we are working with them.

So absolutely and I am pushing hard. I am the most proactive amongst the editors to develop that kind of content in terms of trying to formulate the discussion and inform policy-makers of what should be done.

In fact, one of the things I am very interested in right now is, okay, given the fact that Obama has been reelected and healthcare reform is going to proceed, how should it proceed? In its current form it is not tenable. There are going to need to be modifications. What needs to stay the same? What needs to change? What should be the roadmap? What can we publish that you can hand to a policy-maker and say, this is what you ought to do.

So, yes, we are very interested. I am very interested right now in fungal meningitis. My emphasis at the moment is on two things which are different than what the New England is covering. The New England is covering a lot about fungal meningitis per se. I am more interested and I have a piece on its way that will be published in a few weeks on the appropriate indications for back injections, because a lot of these people got back injections; but I am willing to bet that most of them did not have the right indications. 

And then, more importantly, what should the policy-makers do to prevent this from happening again?

So if somebody hands you a vial of a steroid that you are going to inject in someone’s back, how do you know that that is safe? And it has been surprisingly difficult to get an answer to that. But more importantly, it is naïve to say that the FDA is going to regulate all compounding pharmacies. Because all pharmacies are compounding pharmacies. So if you have the FDA regulating every Walgreen’s on every corner in America, it is just not going to work.

So there has to be some solution to what happened in NECC and with the fungal meningitis problem. What should the policy be? What should the change be? Is it an enforcement issue? Is it a policy? We are interested in all of that.

We have not published a lot of that stuff in the last decade or so, but there is a strong interest in going down that road by our new editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner, and they created this position that I currently occupy to make these kinds of things happen. So we are very interested.

Moderator:Thank you. We do have one follow up question to that and this will be the last question we will take.

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Okay.

Moderator:Would you be interested in Narrative Reviews on health system issues such as how to set up a local or state emergency management system or how to do a better job with state-based health reform implementation?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:Probably. It just depends on the exact topic. There is some interest and we are developing some content along disaster relief and stuff like that. I could not tell you without seeing the exact proposal. But the answer is a definite maybe. I would have to see exactly what you have in mind.

Moderator:Great. Thank you. And would you like to make any concluding comments at this time?

Dr. Edward H. Livingston:No. I think I have talked enough. I appreciate everybody listening. I especially appreciate the VA. Just to reiterate, I started at the VA. I wrote my very first paper from some work done at the VA. I spent a good part of my life as an administrator in the VA and think great things come from the VA. I certainly would like to help VA authors get published. I have met.... a part of this series of things that led up to this particular Cyber Seminar is that I traveled to Washington and met with the leadership of the VA research group, Joel Kupersmith and his people. We talked about how we can help VA authors publish in JAMA. We have a special relationship with the VA because the VA has purchased all of our content. So we want to make sure that we publish things that are relevant to VA readers because there are so many of them. 

So I thank the VA for the opportunity to address its investigators, and hope to see submissions from you all.

Moderator:Great. Well, we would like to echo our thanks to you for coming and sharing your expertise; and thanks to all of our attendees for joining us today. As you exit today’s session, a survey will come up on your web browser. Please take just a moment to fill out that evaluation and also there is a section to submit topics for other Cyber Seminars. So please do fill that out as we like to – much like JAMA, we like to keep things of interest to you on the front lines.

So thanks again, Dr. Livingston, and everyone have a great day. This does conclude today’s Cyber Seminar.

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