September 2002 • Volume 8 • Number 9 |
With a letter addressed to members of "the Family Medicine Community," Journal of Family Practice Editor Mark Ebell, M.D., M.S., in July announced that starting in January, JFP will no longer publish original research.
Ebell said that flat readership and an increasingly competitive market for advertising were among several factors that led to the publisher's decision.
"While personally disappointing to me, this was a business decision by the publisher," said Ebell, associate professor of family practice at Michigan State University, East Lansing. "To some extent, it is a reflection of a broader problem in our specialty: As researchers, we have to do a better job of addressing the needs of the clinicians in our field, and as clinicians, we have to learn to place a higher value on original research done by fellow family physicians and family practice researchers. Unfortunately, we were unable to increase readership to an extent satisfactory to the publisher with research as our predominant theme."
Ebell said he would dedicate himself to repurposing the journal with an emphasis on an evidence-based approach to primary care. As such, to fill the void left by the absence of articles on original research, JFP will publish more POEMs (Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters), Clinical Inquiries, Applied Evidence review articles and other features.
Despite the setback, this development does not sound a death knell for research articles in primary care journals: The Annals of Family Medicine, set to begin publishing in Spring 2003, began accepting research manuscripts last month (see story "Annals seeks manuscripts, reviewers").
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Copyright © 2002 by
American Academy of Family Physicians.