Ch‐ch‐ch‐changes! (2008)

‘If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies’ (Anonymous) With Medical Education performing extremely well according to every metric, it is with excitement that I take on the task of guiding its continued success. Still, as I watch the relatively young field of medical education research mature, the time seems ripe to develop new strategies for the journal that build on current strengths and add new ones. In this editorial I intend to present you with a glimpse of some of the things our editorial team is working on so that you can share in our anticipation and begin thinking about how your own efforts and interests might impact upon the journal and vice versa. So, without further ado, here is a teaser of just some of the changes you can anticipate. As noted in my introductory editorial,1 we at Medical Education will seek to publish only papers that establish a compelling case for advancing knowledge in some fundamental and useful way. There are many ways in which such a claim can be made, but, at its most pragmatic level, it means that reviewers and editors will be asked to evaluate the quality of each piece of submitted work, in part by asking themselves the question: ‘Did I learn something valuable from reading this article?’ An answer of ‘yes’ will require authors to clearly set their work in the context of the scholarship that has come before it. To enable fledgling medical education researchers who are trying to break into the field and medical education practitioners alike to better understand that context, we are encouraging authors to submit review papers on a variety of topics to be published in a section entitled ‘Medical Education in Review’. Let me be perfectly clear from the outset that writing for this section will not require the staking of claims to comprehensiveness. You need not (in fact, please do not!) feel compelled to search for the 24 000 papers that share a common word to find the three with a sufficiently narrow focus to justify inclusion in discussion of a particularly limited topic. Rather, I hope to see (and will be commissioning) a variety of critically synthesising articles that cast their nets broadly to determine what bits and pieces of a variety of research studies and theoretical perspectives can better refine our understanding of the focal topic and guide the community’s continuing efforts to improve the way in which a particular domain is conceived. The goal is thoughtful, empirically based and theory-oriented scholarship rather than absolute systematicity. Authors writing for this section should seek to better understand (and convey an understanding of) a particular concept by consulting a diversity of literatures because relevant research exists not only within medical education, but also in a variety of other disciplines. In many cases authors will be asked (or may volunteer) to provide a ‘crash course’ in an interesting topic or specific research domain in a way that provides an alternative way of thinking about a relevant issue, thereby broadening the perspectives of those of us less familiar with the domain of interest. It is my pleasure to announce that the first in this ‘cross-cutting edge’ series (thanks to Mark Albanese for the pun) is already in the publication queue, so you will be reading it before long. Meanwhile, I welcome suggestions for topics, authors or disciplines you would like to see represented in this section. Please send them to: med@mededuc.com. To make room for this evolution of focus, a couple of categories of manuscripts traditionally sought by Medical Education will no longer be published routinely. Firstly, the My Story papers, in which authors have been asked to submit their personal experiences, will no longer be published in their current form. The creativity and quality of these papers has been wonderful and the story-telling style engendered by this section of the journal is an approach we encourage authors to continue, but by deleting this submission category I am encouraging authors to tell their stories within the contexts of deeper analyses of the existing literatures. I will still accept submissions to the My Story section and consider them for publication if they are received by the end of August 2008. Secondly, I will seek to revise the focus of discussion papers submitted to the journal. To some extent, discussion papers represent a catch-all category, intended to allow flexibility of approach and focus. This does not, however, indicate a venue for the submission of opinion-based monologues. If a theory-based position is to be presented, it should be supported by the analysis of existing theory and empirical findings and, as such, would likely fit better in the journal as a critical review. If you merely want to share a novel perspective on a topic of relevance to health professional education, then a commentary or letter to the editor should represent a reasonable format. The discussion paper category, by contrast, will be reserved for scholarly overviews of issues relevant to research methodology or particular educational practices worthy of debate. Of course, not all submissions need to fit into pre-existing categories. If you have something valuable to say, submit it using the ‘Other’ category and we will be more than happy to consider it for publication; the categories are merely meant to provide some guidance to authors on the types of articles of predominant interest. And, of course, do not forget to send us your Really Good Stuff.2 The editorial team has decided that, starting in the new year, Medical Education will no longer publish an overview box with each article. The purpose of this box has been to force authors to provide a concise description of what is already known on the topic about which they have chosen to write and what the present study adds to that knowledge. The text above should make it clear that we still value and encourage inclusion of that information, but we will make a greater effort to demand that it is included by way of carefully written abstracts, thorough introductions and thoughtful discussion sections. To that end, reviewers of the journal can expect to see changes to the review submission form which reflect an effort to canvass opinion on how well each submitted manuscript conforms to the goals and format of the journal. The review form will be publicly available at http://www.mededuc.com so that authors can access sufficiently clear guidance on how their submissions will be assessed to provide educational value for first-time writers and to enable all authors to proactively address potential issues before the editorial team is forced to raise them. Finally, speaking of http://www.mededuc.com website, those of you who have visited recently will have noticed that it is temporarily redirected to the journal’s page in the Wiley-Blackwell Publishing site. The reason for this is that we are in the midst of constructing a new, state-of-the-art webspace that will push the boundaries of what the journal is able to accomplish for the health professional education community further than ever before. I cannot provide too much detail at the moment, but will let you know that the site is scheduled to go live in 2009 and will have many exciting features that will lead you to bookmark and return to it regularly. It goes without saying that as much as the journal strives to be a force of leadership within the health professional education and educational research communities, it aims at the same time to reflect the activities undertaken by those groups. To that end, feel free to send us your comments and ideas for how the journal could better serve the community at any time, and, more importantly, keep reading, keep writing and stay tuned to this space for further developments.