On this episode of the Academic Medicine Podcast, past editors-in-chief Addeane Caelleigh, Steven Kanter, MD, and David Sklar, MD, and current editor-in-chief Laura Roberts, MD, MA, celebrate Academic Medicine’s 100th anniversary, reflecting on where the journal has been and what the future might hold. They discuss how they approached the role of editor, the journal’s unique place in the community and achievements over the years, and the importance of peer review, publication ethics, and mentorship in building skills, advancing knowledge, and improving health.
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A transcript is below.
Transcript
Toni Gallo:
Welcome to the Academic Medicine Podcast. I’m Toni Gallo. This year, Academic Medicine celebrates its 100th anniversary. In July 1926, the Bulletin of the Association of American Medical Colleges debuted. In that first issue, then editor-in-chief Frank Zapfe noted that, “There has never existed a publication of any sort that was devoted wholly to furthering medical education or to serve as a medium for disseminating views of medical pedagogy. The Bulletin will serve these needs.” It has done just that, chronicling the goings on in medical education and publishing articles that examined the education of physicians. Over the next hundred years, the journal’s reach and quality and scope grew from medical school deans as the primary audience to an international multidisciplinary audience of learners, faculty, professional staff, and leaders across academic medicine. From articles that focused on individual observations and descriptions to theoretically grounded work across article types and methodologies. From a focus on medical schools to one devoted to a wide range of articles of interest to the academic medicine community.
To reflect these changes in 1989, the journal was renamed Academic Medicine. Today, Academic Medicine publishes a broad array of articles from original research to descriptions of innovations, to scholarly perspectives, to original artwork and humanities features that explore research and scientific training, medical and health professions education, healthcare and health systems, community engagement and collaboration, and leadership and professionalism.
To celebrate Academic Medicine’s 100th anniversary and to reflect on where the journal has been and what the future might hold, I’m joined today by past editors in chief, Addeane Caelleigh, Steve Kanter, and David Sklar, and current editor, Laura Roberts. I am thrilled you all are here today on the podcast. I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. I want to start with how you all saw your role as editor-in-chief. What did you think of the role and its position and do you think it’s changed since your time? Anybody is welcome to jump in.
Addeane Caelleigh:
Well, why don’t I jump in to say that I was there, of course, at the transition to the new name change Academic Medicine and I had the excitement and the challenges of picking up the journal in mid-transition from being a medical education research journal primarily to having a wider scope and having an major essay section. And so I had been an editor before, but this field was somewhat different and the journal was somewhat different. And so I had to work my way through the role of the editor in this new publication. And so it seems to me that the role of the editor has changed partly because of… the community has changed and editors have to be both leaders and supporters of the way the whole academic medicine shifts over time. And that’s not just about the issues being involved, but also the sort of community consensus ethics and ethos around the relationship of authors, editors, and readers. So I was in an unusual position.
Steven Kanter:
I’m Steven Kanter, President Emeritus of the Association of Academic Health Centers. And I had the privilege of serving as editor-in-chief for five years, the years 2008 to 2012 inclusive. And I saw the role of editor-in-chief as being the steward of a critical resource for the academic medicine community. And to me, that included everything from making editorial decisions to ensuring that published articles are available and accessible to those who can use them to keeping an eye on what is coming over the horizon, soliciting commentary and perspectives on emerging issues, trying to peer as far as possible into the future to drive critical conversations forward, much as you’ve done recently with artificial intelligence. And I think it also includes ensuring that the journal maintains the highest standards of publication ethics. We introduce new policies, regularly discuss publication and research integrity at workshops and major meetings. And I think that it also includes educating students, residents, junior faculty, and others about best practices in writing and manuscript preparation as well as high quality reviewing so that we create a robust pipeline of highly qualified authors and reviewers for the future. And so those are some of the ways I conceptualize the role of editor-in-chief and I think all of those elements continue to be essential to the role.
Toni, I might mention just quickly five things that occurred during my time as editor-in-chief that I think are relevant to the journal’s history and illustrate how the journal was evolving in the mid 2000s. So number one, I was the first editor-in-chief to have a full-time job outside the AAMC. During the years I served, I was also Vice Dean at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. And I’m very grateful to Darrell Kirch, who was president at the time and Arthur Levine, who was Senior Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences and Dean in Pittsburgh for their support and their foresight in recognizing the value of this new arrangement.
Number two, I was the first editor-in-chief to report to a journal oversight committee and the formation of the Journal Oversight Committee, I think was another important matter, a marker of growth for the journal and for the AAMC and an important step forward in publication ethics. The third issue is when I started, there was not a succession plan in place. And since prior editors worked inside the AAMC, an emergency transition plan, a separate plan, was probably not essential. But given my arrangement, I thought it was. So I proposed to the Journal Oversight Committee and to AAMC that we appoint an associate editor with the notion that I would keep that person sufficiently in the loop to be able to step into the editor-in-chief role if needed. And of course, the person I appointed was on the board at the time and that was David Sklar who went on to succeed me as editor-in-chief.
And fourth, I also felt we needed an associate editor with expertise in statistics and research methods. I thought we were at a point in the evolution of medical educational research and how we were beginning to look at academic health centers as a whole that we needed that. So we created that role and then we also appointed an assistant editor for the Last Page, which seemed to become increasingly popular from the day we initiated it. And I know you’ll say some more things about that, Laura. And the fifth and last thing I’ll say is I formed an arrangement with the editor-in-chief of MedEdPORTAL, which was relatively new at the time, so that the editors in chief of Academic Medicine and MedEdPORTAL would serve on each other’s boards to ensure communication and crosslink between the two publications. So those are some of the things that occurred in the mid 2000s. And I know David and Laura have built on them as the journal has grown and I’ll leave it to them to describe what they did.
David Sklar:
Yeah. Well, great. Well, Steve has set up, I think, a nice opportunity for me to take on what occurred when I became editor-in-chief. So I’m David Sklar. I’m a professor at Arizona State University, which is actually now just started a new medical school that’s combining engineering and medicine. I was actually a senior associate dean for medical education as we went through the LCME visit. So I’ve had an opportunity to replunge back into the early stages of medical education. In any case, I was quite fortunate that I was mentored by Steve Kanter as the associate editor and really gave me the opportunity when I became the editor-in-chief to take over some of the activities that he had started and to continue to build on the foundation, which was a very strong foundation and structure for the journal. There were a few things that occurred, I’ll say, bookends from my time as editor-in-chief.
I became editor-in-chief just as Obamacare was beginning to be implemented. And Obamacare was a huge change in terms of the way the healthcare delivery system was organized and paid for. And so that was one bookend. The other bookend is as I left the journal and handed over the baton to Laura, COVID struck and I think COVID was probably one of the great influencers for change in medical education as well as healthcare. So maybe Laura can talk some more about that. But I had then the opportunity to look at how healthcare delivery and the changes in the healthcare delivery system and medical education could be aligned and how we could use the medical education system to prepare students and residents and faculty to function effectively within a new healthcare delivery system.
That required actually getting out into the community and understanding the various groups, the hospital, the academic health centers, the specialty groups, all that were part of the AAMC. So I actually used some of the capabilities and capacities of the AAMC to get out into the various communities. And then also some of the things I learned… I worked in Washington as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow and realized how important health policy could be for the healthcare delivery system and medical education. So used some of the connections that I had made during that fellowship to find authors and advocacy groups within the healthcare system and bring them into the journal with their voices, the voices of the patients, the voices of our various specialty groups, the rural and urban parts of our community, and to try to get their voices to play an important role within the journal.
Other things that happened for me, at least in the evolution of the journal was that we went from, I think, really more of a emphasis on medical knowledge and practice to the core competencies that were identified by the ACGME and American Board of Medical Specialties, which really had an influence on the way in which we looked at training and medical education. So throughout the time that I was editor, there was a lot of content related to how do you really train future physicians in these identified competencies and taking it from the undergraduate, graduate and continuing education part of our training.
So those were all, I think, really important influences for me and trying to figure out how to integrate them into the journal were very important. I would say other things that I did or tried to do was improve our efficiency in terms of getting back to authors because there were a lot of complaints about how long it took for us to review articles and to get them revised and so on. So really tried to improve our processes there. And I think over time we realized how important getting information out in a timely manner really is because of changes in technology and expectations about the spread of knowledge. So I’ll stop there and maybe can talk some more about some of these things and let Laura continue on from when she started.
Laura Roberts:
Thank you so much. I’m sure the listeners can appreciate how fortunate I feel to have inherited the journal with such a fantastic group of editors. Addeane, helping with midwifing the journal into Academic Medicine from the prior iteration, much more narrowly focused on medical education. Steve commenting on building and curating and stewarding the field, anticipating the most critical emerging issues, but also addressing issues around governance. For example, the reason why the Journal Oversight Committee matters so much is because that is the safeguard that ensures editorial independence of our journal and how profoundly important that is. So Steve’s thoughtfulness and attention to all those issues was so critically important to the journal that I inherited and David’s attention to policy and education and education across all of the continuum and different professions and then also lifting underrepresented voices or less valued historically voices in the field. I would like to believe that I’ve tried to carry forward all of those commitments in a very sincere and I hope effective way.
But I got to tell you, I love being editor-in-chief, but wow, has this been something! I mean, so I came on board and the pandemic hit and it did have such profound implications for not just our world and medical education locally, but globally the impact and policy and people dying and the grief and trauma associated with all of that and the transformation of settings for education and healthcare and the profound impact of burnout and how people felt valued or devalued in their work and the risk, especially at the beginning that health professionals took in taking care of people with COVID. So we literally had people who were dying and who were putting themselves in unbelievable situations.
So all of that was happening and what did our community do? They got serious about offering more to the field and writing up papers. I think the year before I came on board, we had a couple thousand papers. By my second year in, we had more than 4,000 papers in a given year. It was really a wild ride and how to be deeply respectful of the generosity that people showed and tried to write about their experience and write about the field of academic medicine during this time of such extraordinary change. And then of course, George Floyd was murdered and profound impact, especially on the upcoming generation of trainees and what this meant in our world where there was so much rupture of trust throughout all of these things. And then now we’re in a time of such dynamic political change. Academic freedom and what that means in this world is a huge issue. In the last 48 hours, we’ve heard more about how the United States government wants to handle an issue that I would think would be almost technical and not even on their radar, but peer review, eliminating peer review as a standard for evaluating scholarship and science.
So all of the assumptions of the past, it seems like they’ve been reconsidered and that’s been my first six years as editor-in-chief as we’re kind of working through all that. So while all of that’s happening, I’ve been excited to kind of deepen and embrace the full set of missions in academic medicine. Toni ran through them at the beginning, but it’s this idea of certainly education, medical education and educational innovation and excellence across health professions is really first among equals for our journal. I mean, it was where we started and it’s where our hearts are, but also including clinical innovation, clinical services, clinical policy, the advancing science and discovery science through implementation science and how we support… There are so many young scientists who are trained in medical schools and health systems and that is often an underappreciated fact. Community engagement, leadership, building leaders, building the leaders of the future. These are all the things that we’re attending to in the journal. And so just embracing that full set of missions has been important to the work that I’ve been trying to advance.
We also have been trying to work on our processes and we did make a big move to Oxford University Press this year, which has been really exciting and just has brought, I don’t know, sophistication and just a whole other level of excellence in terms of publication, publication ethics, attention to the field. And with that transition, we moved to entirely digital. I can’t remember who moved. Was that Steve where it became digital as well as print during your watch, I think? Yeah. So now it’s moving to, it is entirely digital and we’ve learned a lot along the way. And I think those of us who love holding paper in our hands as we read and relate to the written word in that way, there’s a lot of exciting opportunities by going digital too and the ability to reach people in a way that we haven’t been able to before. So we’re embracing that as well.
I think we’ve done a lot beyond the pages of the journal to build capacity. And so that would be capacity in the field like helping young scholars learn how to develop their work be successfully published. Also, the capacity with our own journal. We started an assistant editor program, which is providing kind of an immersion experience with the journal and I hope we’ll build a whole cadre of editors who will work with our journal on an ongoing basis, but also will be editors of other journals in the future and other kinds of scholarly products. We’ve done a lot to update the features and we’ve built some kind of new standards. We like every single submission to be evaluated by two sets of eyes so that we are building in safeguards and all of the work that we do to try to address bias. Bias is hard to avoid, but at least by introducing these safeguards, we hope that we’ll help with that.
I was going to say the other big explosion in my editor period has been AI coming on board and how I can’t think about misinformation without also thinking about this intersection with AI and this rapid dissemination of all kinds of information, whether it’s accurate or not. And we are seeing submissions that have incorrect, inaccurate information within the papers, but also inaccurate references as well. So almost separate from the idea of the content being inaccurate, we’ve seen a degradation into scholarly rigor and practices around the manuscripts that we’re receiving already. We’re still relying on peer review, again multiple sets of eyes relying on expertise to try and help us with this issue of misinformation and bias, but it’s early days and it’s very, very hard. I welcome others’ comments.
Steven Kanter:
I’m sitting here wondering how I know that each of you is real… And the comments about peer review and misinformation I think are related. So I would just start by saying in any area of scholarship or field of research, getting a real understanding of excellence, of quality, of intellectual independence requires human deliberation and judgment. Measures exist, but they are proxy measures. And in research, you can count the number of dollars an investigator can attract to their laboratory, but that’s a proxy measure of quality and ultimately it requires human judgment to understand quality and the peer review process is a widely used and time tested process that helps us understand that excellence and quality. And I won’t go through all the elements of peer review, but I do want to say that I think peer review also plays an important role in educating reviewers themselves and in helping to prepare the next generation of researchers and educators at medical schools and teaching hospitals. I think the ways in which participation in the peer review process have strengthened the knowledge and skills of reviewers and of learners really could benefit from further study.
And so in contrast to what may be a topic of discussion now, I think I’d like to put on the table that peer review is absolutely essential. It’s the best approach we have to understand excellence and quality. When Laura invited me to write an editorial celebrating the centenary, I included peer review as one of the factors I discussed and I paraphrased Winston Churchill because peer review’s been criticized for being time-consuming for reviewers, costly for journals, frustrating for authors. And Winston Churchill said something similar about forms of government. And in terms of peer review, I think we can say that no one pretends that peer review is perfect or all wise. And I think we can say it is the worst method of assessment except for all those other methods that have been tried from time to time. At the end of the day, human judgment is required and peer review is really the best method we have. Thoughtful, considered, contemplative peer review is essential.
David Sklar:
So Steve, I think you make a great point. However, in the current world, we have these influencers who are not expert and are getting information out that is affecting the public and the public opinion. In the meantime, peer review takes months and sometimes even years to be able to get a paper through the whole process of peer review and revision and finally publication. Meanwhile, whatever the issue was that the person was writing about may have changed and an influencer who wrote about it and got their word out promptly may influence the public opinion and the public perception of that, whatever that issue is in a greater way than the really well-done article that’s published in Academic Medicine. So how do we deal with that reality?
Steven Kanter:
Yeah, that’s an important point, David. Quality and excellence don’t happen overnight. They take time. Yeah, this is an important challenge of our time.
Addeane Caelleigh:
One of the things that I had to deal with that was a years long process was moving from board review to pool review. When I took over the journal, the members of the board were the reviewers. So it was a small group of people, under 20 people, and they had to commit themselves to review for those years they were on the board. And I had to go to pool review, which meant identifying a bewildering variety of people who needed to review. And of course I wanted the best quality and I wanted collegial people and I wanted people who saw what they were doing as educational in nature. And as I say, that took years and years. And it’s very heartening to me to hear the kinds of strengthening the journal has undergone in the years since I was there and to learn, well, first of all, that the concerns are universal and timeless and secondly, that they’re going to be tackled in such a thoughtful way. So I’m very interested in this portion of the discussion.
David Sklar:
So one thing that when I became editor that, and I know Laura later on when she took over, it was even worse, but there were 2,000 articles getting submitted every year and I was reading all of them. So you can imagine and to do that and then screen out about 50% because we didn’t have enough reviewers to really review 2,000 submissions, we could maybe review, I don’t know, 800 or 700 or something like that. So we had to have a pre-screening and I committed to reading them all because I felt like anybody who submitted to us ought to at least know right away whether their article was going to go through the review process. And if it wasn’t, then they could at least not lose too much time and submit to another journal. But that was a very, very challenging amount of time to read that many articles.
And I know, Laura, when you took over, you got other folks to do some of that, but even so, you still can only send out a small proportion of all the articles that get submitted. I feel bad for the people who submit and don’t get any information back because a lot of them have very important messages and useful articles that they could get some help on because I thought one of our jobs was to help the authors to improve their own processes and their own writing and you really can’t do that for all the articles.
Laura Roberts:
The editor-in-chief still reads all the papers that come in. How much time I can give to it in each individual paper it is a challenge given the volume. What’s changed is that we have the deputy editors and a senior editor help with that initial decision around whether it will go for review or not. And then the editor-in-chief, me, I look at every paper if we decide to reject it at that stage, I look at it. So we will have had a deputy editor, a senior editor, and myself look at every single paper that comes in. So I want to be really clear because it’s meant to be a demonstration of commitment and excellence.
What we don’t do is we don’t send individualized letters with individualized feedback at that stage. Because of the volume, we’re just not able to do it. But for those papers that do make it out for review, we do provide individualized feedback from reviewers, from the editorial team, back to those authors. So majority of the papers will never get that individualized feedback and that is regrettable. I appreciate the point you’re saying, but I just want to be clear that each paper is really deeply engaged with by at least two members, senior editors in the current model. And I hope that that will endure.
Toni Gallo:
You all have mentioned mentorship in different ways, but the role of the journal in helping the community in reviewers seeing what other reviewers have written, mentoring authors, mentoring each other. I wonder if you could all talk a little bit about that role of the journal too. Laura, I would love if you would share the story about your first experience with academic medicine.
Laura Roberts:
I’m especially thrilled to be here with Addeane Caelleigh because Addeane gave me the opportunity to work closely with Academic Medicine, believe it or not, when I was a medical student, I don’t know how … I had a mentor, you talked about mentoring. I had a mentor who encouraged me to go ahead with an idea. I had to approach Addeane about developing a special issue of the journal Academic Medicine that focused on ethics training. So ethics was seen as extraordinarily important at that point, but it wasn’t necessarily something you could teach. It was something that you learned at your mother’s knee, the values of your family and your life history. And that’s what you brought to medicine was just the application of those kind of built-in values and ethics. And in that period of time when I was a student, there was an increasing appreciation that there were key competencies, key content areas. There were critical information and abilities that could be taught and learned through medical education experiences and medical education.
So we put together a proposal and sent it to Addeane with tentative and great hope that we would put together a special issue on how to teach medical students about medical ethics and professionalism. And Addeane embraced the idea. And along with my mentor, I put together a special issue, peer reviewed articles that we put into a collection on teaching medical ethics. And that really got me launched. Probably like others on this podcast, I was kind of a humanities kid and had started my little local paper in junior high and that sort of thing. And I have a picture right here for those of you … of me when I was a high school editor of my high school newspaper. So the editing piece was built into me for sure. But the opportunity as a physician and a growing developmental opportunity professionally as a physician to become an editor, I really feel like Academic Medicine gave me my start and particularly Addeane. So I’m very grateful.
Addeane Caelleigh:
Well, one of the most pleasant experiences also someone… somewhat stressful was working with people on these additional special theme issues that would come out as companions, for example. Those were fun. That’s what gave some of us energy to keep going through tough times was the way you get to know the people who are overseeing the theme issue, but also the people who are stepping forward and writing for it and how we all had to pull together to get that out. So I don’t know about other editors’ experiences of that, but it actually gave us extra energy.
David Sklar:
One thing that I experienced, which I don’t know, I think Laura, unfortunately after I stopped being editor, we had COVID and so you couldn’t travel around that much for a while. But Darrell Kirch was a wonderful mentor for me because he actually took me along with him to meetings he went to. There’s this Aspen meeting on healthcare that I was his special guest and I got to meet people who are thought leaders in various areas of healthcare who then became authors for different kinds of opinion pieces that we published in the journal. And without Darrell’s help in introducing me to people who could be really great contributors to the journal, I don’t think I would’ve been able to, particularly with some of the broad communities that exist, I probably wouldn’t have known of them and met the individual. So Darrell was great. And of course, Steve, who’s on this call was a wonderful mentor for me and really so that when I took over, it was not such a huge jump.
Unfortunately, for Laura, when COVID hit, everything was sort of cut off for being able to do things together. And I think it was a wonderful opportunity when I was editor also because people could come together to put together sessions where we actually taught people about the review process and how we looked at articles and how we made decisions about the articles so that they could go back and improve their own scholarly activities based upon the review process, which had sort of been a black box in a way. But by putting together these sessions and inviting people into the inside, I think it really did help folks to understand how we actually looked at papers and judged them and what that process was and then provided mentorship to people who wanted to become reviewers and ultimately to become editors.
Toni Gallo:
So we’ve talked about your roles as editors, but I want to expand that a little bit to how you thought of the role of the journal itself in the community. You’ve touched on that a little bit, some of the specific initiatives or issues, but how did you think of the journal and is there something that you are particularly proud of the journal achieving during your time as editor?
David Sklar:
Well, Toni, I’ll just speak about one thing that I remember. We actually did put together a special supplement on global health and the PEPFAR program in Africa and I actually flew out to Southern Africa. And it was just so appreciated by all of the participants who were leaders of African medical schools that Academic Medicine would publish their educational activities in developing medical schools. Fitzhugh Mullen was there, and I actually had the opportunity before he died of understanding more about his passions of medical education and trying to find ways for us to get to the needs of particularly underserved communities by producing more graduates who would go to those places where they were most needed. But that particularly extended to Africa, which was very underserved as far as physicians and other health professionals. And I was very proud that Academic Medicine took that on and provided, I think, much needed recognition for all the work of the African medical school leaders.
Steven Kanter:
Toni, you mentioned community and what we’re proud of. And I think for me, it’s sort of one and the same. I think what I would say I’m most proud of is that the members of the community, those who work and learn at medical schools and teaching hospitals are so involved with the journal. And I know when I was editor-in-chief, we looked at all these various measures, number of submissions to the journal, Impact Factor, H index, number of downloads, number of people who opened the monthly email AM Express that we created. But when you step back, all of those numbers tell us that individuals are engaging with the journal in meaningful ways and that it was increasing over time. And that I think is what really made a difference for me and what I felt most proud of. I think each of us has played a role in maintaining the journal’s position as the leading journal in its field and that’s something to be proud of. At the end of the day though, I think it’s really about the people and how they engage with the journal and its content.
Toni Gallo:
Addeane, what about you?
Addeane Caelleigh:
Oh my. I saw myself in many ways as a transitional caretaker of the journal. I think someone earlier used the term steward or stewardship and I very much saw myself that way because in some ways I was both an insider and an outsider, which could sometimes be very useful in terms of seeing what was going on in the community. But I knew that my successor, whenever that person would take over, would be someone from the clinical or research side from inside the community. I thought my role was getting everything in place and improving the journal as much as possible and expanding it under the mandate given by the AAMC so that it would be a good journal to pass on to my successor. I think that’s one of the things I’m proudest of is the progress that we made in my years as editor-in-chief and the fact that someone could in fact take it up and then run with it.
Toni Gallo:
I would say everybody here has done that for their colleagues. Laura?
Laura Roberts:
Yeah, I was just going to say I’m so happy to have carried forward so many of the ideas that have been expressed already and to build them out and also to engage with the early career folks in the field. I think that’s something we’ve put a lot of attention to, but I’m struggling with the challenges that we haven’t yet gotten to really. How do we do more across the health professions? How do we do more with our international colleagues and help with the engagement with our international colleagues and engage in co-learning, learn much more about the way that education and professional development and health system development is occurring elsewhere under very adverse circumstances sometimes. So there’s so much to be learned there from the creative solutions that people have come forward with and then the underserved and rural communities of this country, how do we do more to live and embrace the work that’s happening there or needs to happen there, especially in a time of such dynamic change.
So I feel like we have a lot of challenges ahead and that’s just the first few that I can think of. So we have work to do and I don’t think we should rest on our laurels. I don’t think anyone here would think we should either. I think the whole point is to be continuously striving to support excellence in the field and the consequence and impact that our field has in elevating human health and supporting people to create a better future for others in terms of health and wellbeing.
Toni Gallo:
Right, so to finish up today, I want to ask everybody, what should Academic Medicine never stop doing? We’ve had a hundred years, thinking ahead to the next hundred years, what do you want to see the journal keep doing?
Steven Kanter:
All right, I’ll start. So first of all, what the AAMC should never stop doing is publishing Academic Medicine. I think it’s important to mention that the AAMC by owning and supporting the journal and employing its staff provides a wonderful and critical service to our community. And so I want to put that on the table. What Academic Medicine should never stop doing is maintaining editorial independence, being a leader in publication ethics and peer review and striving to understand the ways in which medicine’s unique approach to combining education, research and practice in a single academic health center creates opportunities to improve the health of everyone.
Laura Roberts:
And I agree with all that Steve has said. And I would just say that I hope future editors and that the journal understands that we do the work on the pages of the journal, but we do the other work as well to support the community and build capacity for the future and help support excellence and skill building, especially amongst individuals who we might not have heard of so much in the past to try and elevate those perspectives. Thank you.
David Sklar:
Yeah. Well, I’ll just say I think one thing we should never stop doing is losing sight of the various communities that make up academic medicine and also that we always try to hold on to the centrality of the patient voice because it’s really healthcare and what we do to educate our students is all about improving the health of our various populations. So maintaining that perspective and understanding what people need and being able to provide that in any way that we can, I think is something we need to continue to do.
Toni Gallo:
Addeane, you get the final word.
Addeane Caelleigh:
Oh my. Well, I agree about editorial independence. Well, I can’t improve of what’s been said already for what we should be moving into in the future, but this is such a diverse field that Academic Medicine is one of the few places that can draw so many communities and subcommunities together. And I think we never lead to… lose sight of that, that this is a core function and we should keep doing it the very best we can.
David Sklar:
Yeah, agreed.
Toni Gallo:
I think that’s a great note to end our conversation on. I want to thank you all for being here today and I want to encourage our listeners throughout the year there’ll be a number of pieces in the journal from our editors and from others in the community to celebrate the hundredth anniversary and to think about the future of the journal and the future of our field. So keep an eye out for all of those. They’re going to be available on academicmedicine.org. Some are out now, some are coming out over the next few months. And I want to encourage everybody who’s listening to join us on social media, tell us about your experiences, what the journal has meant to you and what we should never stop doing. You can find the journal on LinkedIn at Academic Medicine Journal and remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening today.