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New Editor for Archives of Internal Medicine

Philip Greenland, MD

Arch Intern Med. 2008;168(22):2401.

With 2009 just around the corner, I extend a welcome to the new editor of the Archives, Rita Redberg, MD, MSc, who begins her editorship in January. Dr Redberg is Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of Women's Cardiovascular Services at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. In addition to her interest in cardiovascular technology assessment and outcomes research, Dr Redberg has a masters of science in health policy and administration from the London School of Economics in England and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow and worked in the US Senate. Dr Redberg is well qualified to lead the Archives, now 100 years old, to an even higher level as one of the world's leading journals in general medicine.

The change in editors brings to a close my 5-year term as editor of the Archives. At the beginning of 2008, I summarized some of the progress that occurred during my term as editor.¹ Submissions have continued to rise, the impact factor has increased, and the journal has become more international in scope. I am certain that Dr Redberg and her team will continue these encouraging trends.

As I depart, it is worth considering what the role of a medical journal is, and can be, in 2009 and beyond. As an editor colleague of mine told me, medical journals are simple—all you have to do is make sure that the articles report information that is "new and true." If both of those criteria are satisfied, the journal should be well respected and useful to its physician readers and other consumers of health information. However, as I have learned these past 5 years, making sure that an article is both new and true is not always simple. For example, there is a tendency for authors, research sponsors, reviewers, and editors to favor positive results over negative or neutral results, producing a publication bias. One commentator² has gone so far to say that such biases lead to a situation where "most published research findings are false"! Everyone involved—authors, editors, reviewers, sponsors of research—must be committed to publishing well-conducted studies no matter what the results of the research. This is especially true with clinical trials of new therapies, and also important with the growth of genomic testing that can produce highly statistically significant results that must be replicated before they are published and adopted as "truth." Replication of results must be included in the original research reports of genotype-phenotype associations,³ and editors must resist the temptation to publish something that is "new" unless they are reasonably certain that it is also "true." Everyone involved must strive to assure the validity of published research.

Honesty and integrity in reporting are also critical to the success of the medical publishing process. In this past year alone, I encountered discouraging instances of duplicate publication, salami science, seeding trials and marketing trials, as well as episodes of ghostwriting and guest authorship. Despite the recent attention given to some of these issues surrounding the rofecoxib litigation,⁴ I recently received a forwarded e-mail from a distinguished colleague who was solicited by a pharmaceutical company employee to serve as a guest author on several review articles that were of interest to the company. The letter from a prominent company representative concluded: "If you have an interest in authoring [one of these suggested papers] please let me know and forward your CV to me. I will submit your name and CV to the Publications team [of the company]." The colleague who forwarded this to me was appropriately shocked and dismayed by the request and refused to participate. Fortunately, many physicians would refuse to cooperate as my colleague did. However, many undoubtedly would have agreed, and these dubious practices must stop. Unless all of us regard these invitations as offensive and objectionable, the integrity of medical publishing will decline. These types of breaches of ethical conduct are no longer secrets within the profession; they are often reported in the public media, and they greatly damage the credibility of our work. These are issues that should concern all of us: readers, authors, study sponsors, editors, reviewers, and consumers. We must all work hard to maintain the highest ethical standards in writing and publishing, or all of us will suffer, most especially our patients.

As I close this chapter of the Archives’ history, I wish the best of success to Dr Redberg and her colleagues. I know they will strive to assure that the Archives publishes the best material that is both "new" and "true," and I expect Dr Redberg will uphold the highest ethical standards in her work. I thank my editorial team for their outstanding service and tremendous efforts to uphold the standards I have discussed above. At the same time, I also want to apologize to any authors or reviewers whom I may have inadvertently offended over the past 5 years. Medical publishing would be impossible—obviously—were it not for the interest of hard-working and dedicated authors in publishing their work and the mostly unsung contributions of reviewers to assist voluntarily in vetting the work. I thank all of these contributors and acknowledge their efforts on our behalf.

AUTHOR INFORMATION
Correspondence: Dr Greenland, Department of Preventive Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, 750 N Lake Shore Dr, Chicago, IL 60611 (p-greenland{at}northwestern.edu).

REFERENCES
1. Greenland P. 100 Years at the Archives of Internal Medicine: taking stock and looking ahead. Arch Intern Med. 2008;168(1):11-12. FREE FULL TEXT 2. Ioannidis JP. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Med. 2005;2(8):e124. FULL TEXT | PUBMED 3. Chanock SJ, Manolio T, Boehnke M; et al, NCI-NHGRI Working Group on Replication in Association Studies. Replicating genotype-phenotype associations. Nature. 2007;447(7145):655-660. FULL TEXT | PUBMED 4. Ross JS, Hill KP, Egilman DS, Krumholz HM. Guest authorship and ghostwriting in publications related to rofecoxib. JAMA. 2008;299(15):1800-1812. FREE FULL TEXT

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