A Look Back and a Look Ahead Annals of Internal Medicine 1 July 1997. With this issue, Annals marks its 70th anniversary. Annals continues to publish the highest-quality clinical science balanced with a broad mix of material on the social, economic, and human dimensions of the specialty.
Anniversaries are occasions for looking back but also for looking to the future.
For medical publishing, that future has a distinctly electronic shape. Along with most other journals, we have for some time been pondering our place in that unstable but exhilarating electronic world. As early as the 1980s, the full text of Annals was available on-line, but in a system that now seems impossibly archaic. We've learned a lot since those ancient days. Medical readers still get most of their information in print, and we see a central role for print publication for a long time to come.