Five Years Before the Masthead: Our Journey with the Journal of General Internal Medicine

As in Richard Henry Dana’s classic American seafaring novel, Two Years Before the Mast1, our time at the helm of the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM) has been filled with adventure. We have charted our course with specific goals and objectives while navigating the shoals of increasing time commitments for editors and reviewers while facing the rising storm of e-publishing. In this five-year retrospective, we reflect upon this journey, assess the degree to which we met our goals, and discuss lessons learned from which our successors may build and sail a stouter ship. In 2004, we were pleased to be chosen as the fifth set of editors of JGIM. In our proposal to the Council of the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM), we listed five specific goals and objectives we would attempt to achieve during our tenure (Table 1). Attacking these goals has been a challenge, a significant learning experience, and quite rewarding for all three of us. Because this is the last issue of the Journal to be published during our tenure as editors, we wanted to take this opportunity to document the degree to which we have met those initial goals and speculate upon JGIM’s future. Table 1 Original Goals and Objectives in 2004 Proposed by the JGIM Co-Editors GOAL 1: INCREASE THE NUMBER OF PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES PUBLISHED During the five years prior to the current editorship (2000–2004), the mean number of manuscripts received per year was 694 (increasing from 480 to 937). The mean number of “regular articles” (i.e., excluding editorials, reflections, book and media reviews, and letters to the editor) was 594, increasing from 381 in 2000 to 788 in 2004 (Fig. 1). By comparison, during the five years of our editorship (July 1, 2004 through June 30, 2009), we received 4,879 manuscripts (not counting manuscripts submitted to supplements or special issues), a mean of 976 per year, a 41% increase over the prior five years. A total of 4,273 “regular articles” were submitted during the past five years, a mean of 855 per year, a 44% increase over the prior five years. Figure 1 Manuscripts received and articles published by year from 2000 through 2008. The current editors began accepting manuscripts July 1, 2004. The blue bars represent all manuscripts and the red bars represent “regular” manuscripts, which excludes ... From 2000 through 2004, a mean of 126 articles (range 107 to 134) were published per year in regular issues of JGIM (i.e., not including supplements). This increased by 121% to 271 per year (range 201 to 279) during the first four years of our editorship. (Data for 2009 are incomplete at this time.) We reached this goal of increasing published articles through a number of planned objectives aimed at making the most of JGIM’s page budget, including 1) reducing the maximum number of words per article from 3,500 to 3,000 for most article types; 2) making greater use of Brief Reports; 3) publishing appendices online only; and 4) improving the formatting of JGIM articles to reduce the amount of white space. We were also able to increase the number of published articles when, in 2007, JGIM changed its publisher to Springer who raised JGIM’s page budget dramatically. Maximizing space and increasing JGIM’s page budget allowed us to increase the acceptance rate for regular articles (excluding editorials, reflections, book reviews, and letters to the editor) from 20% during the final year of our predecessors to 25–26% from 2005 through 2007. Increasing the acceptance rate was not a stated goal. Rather, we told our Deputy Editors to accept for publication all articles they felt were worthy of publication in JGIM.