The BMJ’s impact and influence should be measured by more than just established metrics such as impact factor. But the new figures, released two weeks ago, are very welcome. The journal’s impact factor rose more than 20% to 17.215. My first thought on discovering this was that a strategic aim to increase the impact of the BMJ’s scholarly content is starting to […]
Category: Editors at large
Domhnall MacAuley: Are there any aspects of healthcare about which you are passionate?
Health inequality. As an editor, we see lots of papers on health inequality; an anodyne, antiseptic term that trips off the tongue without baggage. Not much new. But, in practice it means poor people, who may smoke too much, eat the wrong food, don’t have jobs, live in the wrong place, have lots of illness, […]
Helen Macdonald: Do I practise global health?
I was strolling around the poster hall at the WONCA conference in Prague yesterday, when the question occurred to me. I fell into conversation with the presenters of two linked posters. Joane Baumer and her colleagues, who were visiting from Texas, USA. They work for the JPS health network and have a developed a global […]
Birte Twisselmann on the HighWire Spring Publisher’s conference—massive, open, online, and individualised
Every three years or so I am lucky enough to attend our webhost HighWire’s spring publisher’s meeting at Stanford University in sunny California. This year was no exception—the meeting was an absolute delight. Some 200 participants shared the products showcase, presentations by publishers, insights from industry, and Highwire’s plans and projects over the two days […]
Readers’ editor: International research
The BMJ wants its research papers to help doctors make better decisions, which is why they are open access and free to view. But to deliver on the pledge our research also needs to be scientifically valid, clinically relevant, widely read and cited, and appeal to international readers. Each year we get more than 3000 […]
Trish Groves: What does Tamiflu do, and how will we know?
Jonathan Nguyen-Van-Tam, virologist and researcher from the University of Nottingham, told a group of triallists and virologists last week “we must remember why we’re here—because of the controversies. The clinical world doesn’t believe that Tamiflu works. We should assess whether the regulatory approval/product insert for Tamiflu is valid.” […]
Trish Groves: Data sharing—making it real
The evidence base for current treatments has been built largely on aggregated results published in journal articles—articles that report trials initiated and sponsored by industry in order to get marketing approval for its products. At last we’re moving towards knowledge based on independent analyses of the original data about real participants in clinical trials, with […]
Domhnall MacAuley: The US champions primary care
When the US starts to champion primary care, it is time to sit up. With its traditionally specialist focus, this may seem out of character, but as a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, there is increasing focus on family medicine. In a perspectives article last year in the NEJM, Susan Okies […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Unintended misconduct identified in research
Two recent stories provoked a fascinating discussion on misconduct in research—that have nothing to do with the authors, and in the most unlikely of journals. The May 15th edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology explored these two cases in detail. There was no suggestion of research misconduct by the authors, but these controversies introduce […]
Anita Jain on the Bangladesh factory collapse and corporate responsibility for worker safety
“A mother of two, her left arm amputated, she refuses to ever go near a sewing machine again.” In April this year, the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh collapsed killing over a 1000 people and injuring many more. Among poignant accounts of despair that emerged from the incident, I felt this woman’s situation reflected the […]