JAMA Internal Medicine—The Year in Review, 2020 (2024)

• ¹Editor, JAMA Internal Medicine

• ²Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

We welcome the promise of 2021—to start to get control of the global pandemic via vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 and effective public health measures and hopefully let the country get back to the hard work of promoting high-value health care that is affordable and available to all Americans. As a new US administration with significant health care expertise begins work, we are hopeful to see progress on complex issues, such as value-based payment, drug pricing, and transparency issues, to name a few.¹We are interested to learn what the impact of sharply reduced elective health care visits and reduced cancer screenings will be as we track rates of breast cancer, lung cancer, heart disease, and many others in the coming decade. We are now in the 10th year of the JAMA Internal Medicine Less is More series and are pleased to see international attention to the harms of overdiagnosis and overtreatment and on programs to increase high-value care. Of course, our work is far from done, as health care costs continue to rise much faster than the gross domestic product and approach one-fifth of the US economy.

2020 was a year for the record books in many ways, and JAMA Internal Medicine saw submissions per month triple in the summer months and finished the year at nearly twice the number of submissions ever (Table).^2-9 It is always a joy to be able to read authors’ submitted manuscripts, and we tried to balance the increased submissions and the pressures of trying to help inform and thus stem a worldwide pandemic with timely publications of COVID-19–related articles^2-9 while continuing to publish important articles not related to the pandemic. Thanks to a lot of hard work from an incredible editorial team, we managed to reduce our turnaround times both for days from receipt to first decision without peer review as well as with peer review and even shorter times from manuscript acceptance to publication and receipt to publication (Table). We love talking with authors (even virtually) at conferences and hearing stories about how publishing articles in JAMA Internal Medicine boosted careers, helped get grants or important committee assignments, and helped in clinical practice. Articles published in JAMA Internal Medicine have wide readership, as there were 14.7 million views and downloads of journal articles last year. We strive to publish articles that will help guide and inform the practice of medicine, including for the care of patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection—either teaching something new to improve outcomes or identifying a practice to avoid for lack of benefit. We will continue to publish articles on the daily challenges in health care and medicine and focus on ways to improve the experience for clinicians and patients as well as approaches to improve health care systems and public health.

Our team of Editorial Fellows and an international team of Teachable Moments Editorial Fellows led by Deborah Grady, MD, MPH, continue to curate a fascinating and educational collection of patient issues we can all learn from. We enjoy hearing how readers are using the Teachable Moments series and other articles in caring for patients. We encourage authors to include a figure or table in Teachable Moment submissions as many of these articles are the basis of journal club discussions. We will be accepting applications for the 2021-2022 Teachable Moments Editorial Fellow position, which is open to internal medicine chief residents across North America in April 2021. Do also check out our Patient Pages, a great new section for practical patient advice, led by Michael Incze, MD, MSEd, with topics such as how to handle advance care planning,¹⁰ medical cannabis,¹¹ and low testosterone,¹² and to name just a few.

In fall 2020, we also started creating Visual Abstracts for clinical trials.¹³ We hope these help in understanding and sharing the key points via social media, an increasingly important platform for dissemination of medical information. And we hope you enjoy our author podcasts; please send us suggestions for topics you would like to hear covered and any feedback, and please subscribe to JAMA Internal Medicine podcasts here.

We could not do this without our wonderful peer reviewers.¹⁴ We rely on their expertise and input to help guide our decisions to help select high-quality science that makes a difference. I thank these reviewers, authors, and the readers of JAMA Internal Medicine.

Corresponding Author: Rita F. Redberg, MD, MSc, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, 505 Parnassus Ave M1180, San Francisco, CA 94143 (rita.redberg@ucsf.edu).

Published Online: March 22, 2021. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.0351

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.

See More About

Citation

Redberg RF. JAMA Internal Medicine—The Year in Review, 2020. JAMA Intern Med. 2021;181(5):583–584. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.0351

Manage citations:

© 2024