Family Practice Vol. 21, No. 1, 1-2
© Oxford University Press 2004, all rights reserved.
Editorial |
A new editor for Family Practice
Guy's, King's & St Thomas' School of Medicine, London, UK
E-mail: roger.jones{at}kcl.ac.uk
Jones R. A new editor for Family Practice. Family Practice 2004; 21: 1–2.
Martin Luther believed that no-one should stay in a professional role for more than 10 years before moving on, and I am sure that you can think of many other aphorisms that would indicate that I have been in this job too long. Well, Family Practice has a new Editor, but before I tell you who it is, I would like the opportunity to reflect on Family Practice, primary care, publishing and research.
John Howie, one of Glasgow's most distinguished sons and certainly Edinburgh's most distinguished primary care researcher, was the founding editor of Family Practice. This was a joint venture between Oxford University Press and the Royal College of General Practitioners, to whom we must be grateful for helping to launch the journal. For several years, ‘WONCA News’ was published as an insert and the WONCA logo appeared on the front cover. In the early days, the assistant editor was located in the JRCGP office in Edinburgh. John's international reputation ensured that, from the outset, high-quality material was submitted to Family Practice, but he supplemented the spontaneous submissions by identifying, from papers published elsewhere, a knowledge of higher degrees in progress and a careful reading of conference abstract books, promising young authors, and inviting them to submit their work to the journal. He recognized that, at the point of completing an MD thesis, the candidate was likely to know more about their chosen subject than almost anyone else living, and would make an ideal author of a review article. When I took over Family Practice 14 years ago, I inherited a vigorous publication with a substantial, and growing, international profile.
Like all new editors, I decided to change the format and to re-design the cover. I hope that, unlike one luckless Lancet editor, I am remembered for doing more than that. I have tried hard to encourage innovation and have sometimes taken risks with articles that might not have found favour elsewhere. In particular, Family Practice has provided a home for papers employing novel methodologies, often qualitative approaches strongly influenced by the social and behavioural sciences, as well as more traditional, empirical, quantitative studies. The emphasis has always been on original articles and, while I am not sure that I agree that there is nothing new under the sun, this has sometimes created difficulties. When new observations are made or novel interventions tested in countries without a strong primary care research tradition, the resulting reports may be truly original in the local context, although perhaps less novel for a wider, international audience. This inevitable tension between encouraging the development of a primary care research tradition and holding fast to principles of novelty, quality and generalisability makes for some interesting editorial decision-making.
No less interesting has been the observation, from the Editor's chair, of the peer review process in action. I have been fortunate not to have found myself embroiled in some of the quasi-legal publishing dramas that have impinged on other editors and other journals. In general, the authors and reviewers of Family Practice are a decent lot, not much given to unethical practices or, indeed, to the levels of savagery that I have encountered in reviews of papers and grants in other medical settings. Indeed, in recent years, I have been impressed and humbled by the care and constructive criticism provided by our loyal band of reviewers and the very small number of occasions on which a review has been challenged on the basis of its scientific content. Occasionally, of course, authors are unshakably convinced that their paper is within a hairsbreadth of winning a Nobel nomination, and a certain amount of editorial sangfroid is required to settle the matter. About as frequently, a well-reasoned appeal against rejection, often followed by a further review, leads to the acceptance of a manuscript that might have been very slightly misjudged. The Editor's decision is final—almost.
The most precious, and scarcest, commodity has, of course, been time. Cicero said that if he had had more time he would have written a shorter book, but I don't agree with him. If I had had more time I would have commissioned more editorials, sought out more experts to write methodological papers and processed manuscripts more speedily. I would also have had more opportunity to participate in some of the fringe benefits of being an Editor—the WONCA Editors' Workshops, the activities of the Committee on Publication Ethics and the excellent series of peer review research conferences organized by Richard Smith and the British Medical Journal.
One commodity, however, which has never been in short supply has been editorial freedom. Neither the College, nor WONCA, nor Oxford University Press itself have attempted to exert any significant editorial control over the content of the journal. I have been well supported and well advised by OUP's senior managers, notably Mandy Sketch and, most recently, Claire Saxby, and especially by my fantastic production editor, Sarah Blackwell. On the few occasions where Family Practice has been accompanied by a supplement, OUP's marketing and promotional team have been superb. I have also had tremendous support from many colleagues in primary care and would like to offer special thanks to Robert Williams, from the Medical College of Virginia, for his work on Selections from Current Literature, and to pay tribute to his successor, Jeff Trilling, whose Selections always arrive in perfect editorial condition, bang on time. We owe Jeff and his many colleagues at Stony Brook, NY an enormous debt of gratitude. Boundless thanks too to Peter Pritchard, who was the Book Reviews Editor when I started editing Family Practice and, more recently, to Oliver Samuel who has carried on the task with great flair and distinction. Oliver is now stepping down and our grateful thanks go to him. Thanks also to the journal's Editorial Board, particularly David Mant, Graham Watt, Chris van Weel and the late and much-missed Chris Silagy, and to the members of the International Advisory Board, many of whom are also standing down, and whose names are associated with some of the most significant developments in primary care research and publishing over the last two decades.
But now we come to the interesting bit, and I am delighted to reveal that Professor Brendan Delaney, from the Department of General Practice and Primary Care in the University of Birmingham, UK, is taking over from me as Editor of Family Practice at Easter 2004. Brendan is a distinguished primary care academic, with an international research reputation for his work in gastrointestinal disorders, and is presently Secretary of the Society for Academic Primary Care in the UK. He is also a leading member of the Society for Medical Decision Making, prominent in the Cochrane community, and an expert exponent of the systematic review and meta-analysis, skills which he has brought to bear most effectively on the development of guidelines in the UK, under the auspices of the Health Technology Assessment programme and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. It would not be appropriate for me to leak Brendan's plans for developing Family Practice but, suffice it to say that I think he will do more than re-design the front cover.
Time to move on. I suppose I will miss the daily arrival of those fat A4 envelopes, sometimes plastered with exotic stamps, occasionally rushed from far corners of the globe by courier, and always containing, on careful palpation, the tell-tale 4'' x 4'' bulge of the floppy disk. I certainly won't miss sitting at my desk on a Sunday afternoon trying desperately to think of two referees for a particularly dense and obscure paper from a country where English is not even the second language.
O tempora! O mores! I suppose I will find something to do in my life after Family Practice helped, perhaps, once again by Martin Luther: ‘who loves not woman, wine and song remains a fool his whole life long’.
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