The New JCEM Format Free

2016 ushers in several notable changes for JCEM. The New Year marks its 75th anniversary, which we will celebrate by publishing a special Anniversary Issue in April during the 100^th anniversary of the Endocrine Society at our annual meeting in Boston. The Anniversary Issue will feature 10 original Perspectives articles by noted authors from each subdiscipline of clinical endocrinology.

But first, as you have already noticed, this January issue of JCEM presents a new format. We hope it will increase its attractiveness and usefulness to you. We have heard from you that the Journal has grown to be too hefty and that the Table of Contents (TOC) is hard to find. This seems most easily explained by the incredible growth in scientific information over the past decade. However, a more critical question is this: Why has the Impact Factor (IF) of the Journal been stuck at the same level for years, whereas IFs for other endocrine journals have steadily increased. This is true, but curious, because JCEM is consistently judged internationally as the most highly cited endocrinology journal.

In response, we have made some format changes. The cover now features the titles and authors of manuscripts judged by our Reviewers and Editors as the most highly rated for a given issue. The rationale is to provide at a glance the breadth of JCEM's content—something for everyone. At the same time, we feel that the pressure of increasing amounts of new knowledge and increased clinical demands have led to a trend of narrowing interests in the general field of endocrinology. Yet, as an intellectual principle, we know we need to keep abreast of advances in subdisciplines that are not our primary focus. We prefer to grow the unique knowledge we accrued during our fellowship training, not lose track of it. Just as importantly, we realize that to provide the best treatment for our patients, we often have to consider multifactorial problems that cross the borders between the subspecialties of endocrinology.

This educational emphasis on being a complete physician has prompted us to eliminate the multiple versions of the TOC. These highly refined categories were originally created to make it easier for readers to quickly find the articles of interest to them. A timesaver, no doubt. But the use of this strategy has the drawback of overlooking important manuscripts that fall into an alternate subcategory. A special new feature in the TOC that we feel will be very helpful in this regard is the addition to each title of a brief precise describing in plain English exactly what the article reports and what conclusions were drawn.

The matter of IFs is controversial. Many view IFs as valuable, yet many also view them as anti-intellectual. The inescapable truth is that IFs have come to be used by promotion committees and by study sections as convenient value judgments of the worth of academic faculty and their research. JCEM wants to be supportive of our members' journey up the academic ladder. We do not want to be regarded by them as a second-choice journal for their best research because of our IF. Consequently, we have set a goal to increase our IFs. We are doing this by decreasing our acceptance rate from roughly 28% to 20%. Raising the bar will have two beneficial effects. It will ensure that the general quality of our manuscripts will grow in excellence, which means they will be more likely to be cited. It will also diminish the number of articles we publish, which will decrease the bulk of the Journal. This will inescapably increase our IF because this calculation, simply put, is derived by dividing the number of times our articles are cited by the number of articles we publish.

It should be noted that coincident with this decrease in the acceptance rate for JCEM, the Endocrine Society is developing additional peer-reviewed publications for quality submissions in endocrinology research and practice that will be announced later in 2016.

We encourage you to tell us what you think of the JCEM format changes. We welcome your comments and wish you fruitful and thoughtful reading.

Abbreviations

 
• IF

  impact factor

 
• TOC

  Table of Contents.