On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the founding of Academic Emergency Medicine.

s in their native languages. We developed a section called Dynamic Emergency Medicine that linked a static image and case presentation in the journal’s print copy, to a dynamic image online, thus allowing for presentation of case studies in a unique way or procedural demonstrations relevant to daily emergency medicine practice. The SAEM Board of Directors responded to the journal’s growth trajectory by increasing support personnel, and Sandi Arjona and Kathleen Seal entered into their key supportive roles, where they both still remain. It is clear that without their enthusiastic support and loyalty, the journal would have foundered under the sheer burden of a rapidly and ever‐increasing workload. While it seemed intuitive that SAEM would always allow editorial decision‐making to remain in the hands of the AEM editorial board, our editors witnessed events at other journals where political considerations of journal sponsors seemed to interfere with final journal content. With the encouragement of the SAEM Board of Directors, the AEM Editorial Independence Policy was developed, authored by Roger Lewis. The content of AEM has never been bound by any political constituents; the SAEM Board of Directors has wisely left the running of the journal to the capable hands of an outstanding editorial board. This has allowed for experimentation and innovation in journal content and management and has resulted in an outstanding final product. During this phase, the journal took on a more visible role in the SAEM annual meeting and began to host a series of reviewer’s workshops and didactic sessions on scientific writing, ethics, and research designs. The SAEM board and the program committee added the editor-in-chief as a designated moderator of the plenary session, along with the president. Perhaps the most important event in the second phase of AEM was the development of the journal’s annual consensus conferences. The concept (suggested by Jim Adams) was that our journal had a responsibility beyond the publication of original work; in addition, the journal should educate our readers about timely and controversial medical, social, and research issues in general, while stimulating thought and studying making these topics relevant to emergency medicine in particular. The consensus conference topics often (and serendipitously) paralleled topics currently under consideration by the Institute of Medicine, such as errors in medicine and disparities in care. The conferences have been organized by some of the most well‐known thought leaders of our specialty, and the audiences often are the “who’s who'' of topic experts. A complete issue of the journal is dedicated each year to the proceedings of the annual consensus conference and related original work. Because of the timeliness of the yearly consensus conference topics, the conferences were able to self-fund within a few years of their initiation, with funding from U.S. and Canadian federal agencies and private foundations. Recent work by the current AEM editorial board has shown long‐term and significant benefit of the AEM consensus conferences in terms of subsequent research efforts, publications, and funding. Again, a solid foundation had been set for the current phase of the journal’s development. Michelle H. Biros, MD, MS Hennepin County Medical Center Editor‐in‐Chief, 1998–2008 THE CURRENT ERA AND THE NEXT 20 YEARS Twenty volumes ago, in 1994, the journal had a 14-member editorial board, six issues per year, and 592 pages of content. Currently, we have a 70-member editorial board, 12 issues per year, about 1,600 pages of print content, and several dozen more pages of electronic content each year. Why such a large editorial board? First, as noted by our founding editor above, a “consensus review'' is created for each paper, rather than simply forwarding the raw reviewer comments to the author, as many journals do, leaving the author to sort out the often confusing or even conflicting reviewer comments. Our consensus reviews are more user‐friendly. They allow authors to focus on the key issues and eliminate conflicting statements, but take substantially more time and effort on the part of the decision editor. Our large editorial board permits us to spread this workload around and also ensures that we have adequate breadth of expertise and a significant number of editors with “niche'' expertise in specific topic areas or research methodologies. For example, every survey submission is screened by one of two editors with masters‐level education in survey methodology, and only those papers meeting basic methodology standards are sent for peer review. Finally, the large number of decision editors helps us maintain our very rapid turnaround times, by ensuring that no editor is working on too many papers simultaneously. Our diverse editorial board has also enabled us to add several unique sections to our journal in recent years, including our “Research Methods and Statistics'' category, which provides detailed discussions of novel study methodologies and advanced statistical techniques that are likely not familiar to the typical reader; the “Biros Section on Research Ethics,'' which celebrates the work of the previous editor-in-chief by providing a forum for work on the ethics of clinical research in emergency medicine; and our newest section, “Evidence‐Based Diagnostics,'' with articles that seek to answer diagnostic clinical questions on a single topic pertinent to most emergency physicians using a diagnostic systematic review. (An online tool is planned that will allow the reader to literally take the EBD to the patient’s bedside to assist in real-time clinical decision‐making.) Our new “Peer‐Reviewed Lectures'' (PeRLs) section is a joint effort of SAEM, the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors (CORD), and ACEP, with an editorial subboard of education experts from all three organizations, offering clinician‐educators an avenue to receive academic “credit'' for high-quality lecture presentations. (We also have a number of peer reviewers from CORD who assist with the review of “Educational Advances'' papers.) Finally, our editorial board is supplemented by a cadre of statistical reviewers (both quantitative and 110 Hedges et al. • 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF ACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE