JAMA Internal Medicine—The Year in Review, 2022 (2024)

The US enters the fourth year of the COVID-19 pandemic with increasing health care challenges. Medicare is heading toward insolvency, launch prices of new drugs are reaching an all-time high, and Congress is increasingly dysfunctional. At JAMA Internal Medicine, our hard work of promoting high-value health care that is accessible to all is more important than ever. Meanwhile, we are continuing to watch closely the implementation phase of reducing low-value care. The journal’s Less is More series of articles, which is entering its 13th year, is as important as ever. In 2023, we hope to see progress on complex issues such as value-based payment, drug pricing, and transparency of data and regulatory decisions, to name just a few. We continue to inform our readership and propose solutions to increase high-value care.

For JAMA Internal Medicine, 2022 was a banner year in many ways. The journal’s impact factor soared to an all-time high of 44.46, climbing from lower than 10 when I started as Editor in 2009. On behalf of the entire incredible editorial team, we appreciate this recognition (and many others) of the importance and relevance of the articles we publish to the practice and to health care. COVID-19 continued to dominate the news and was the subject of the journal’s most-cited articles (Table).^1-7 The most-viewed article of 2022 was a study of ivermectin treatment for patients with COVID-19,¹ notable for both most views and downloads, as well as the highest Altmetric attention score. This randomized clinical trial found that ivermectin treatment during early illness did not prevent progression to severe disease among high-risk adult patients with mild to moderate COVID-19. Despite lack of evidence of benefit, use of this drug for treatment of COVID-19 continues.

Thanks to the hard work of the amazing editorial team and triage led by Editor at Large and Online Editor Robert Steinbrook, MD, the turnaround times both for days from receipt to first decision without peer review as well as with peer review and all other turnaround times remain fast (Table). We love hearing stories about how publishing in JAMA Internal Medicine boosted authors’ careers, helped get a grant or important committee assignment, or helped in clinical practice. And others want to read this work in JAMA Internal Medicine, as there were 13.8 million downloads and more than 26 000 media mentions of JAMA Internal Medicine articles—the journal’s highest ever. We strive to publish articles that will help in the practice of medicine, including for the care of patients with COVID-19, either teaching something new to improve outcomes or 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 the health care system.

The team of JAMA Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco is pleased to have had the pleasure of publishing the best work and starting many conversations on how to provide health care and improve quality and access. We love working with the always-incredible class of University of California, San Francisco Editorial Fellows and elective residents, as well as the North American team of Teachable Moments Editorial Fellows led by Deputy Editor Deborah Grady, MD. We are delighted that the Teachable Moments series and other articles help in caring for patients and serve as the basis for many journal club (and other) discussions.

I would like to call out the Patient Pages as well, which I frequently hand out to patients in clinic or include the toll-free link in their after-visit summaries. Michael Incze, MD, Patient Page Editor (and former JAMA Internal Medicine Editorial Fellow) takes great care to synthesize information of use to clinicians and patients in a brief summary with graphics on topics such as what to do if a loved one is in the intensive care unit, how to decipher Part D coverage, and the new Alzheimer drugs, to name a few. Please also do continue to enjoy the Author Interview podcasts and send us suggestions for topics you would like to hear covered and any feedback. Please subscribe to JAMA Internal Medicine Author Interviews at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/pages/jama-internal-medicine-author-interviews.

As the Editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, I am incredibly proud of the authors and editorial team who made these groundbreaking articles and insightful reviews possible. (Note: While the sentiments in this previous sentence are true, the actual sentence was written by ChatGPT.) We will have more to come on the topic of artificial intelligence in medicine in the coming weeks and months and refer authors to guidance on transparent reporting of use of artificial intelligence, language models, and similar technologies in medical research and publication.^8,9

Finally, we could not do our work without the wonderful peer reviewers for JAMA Internal Medicine, who are listed elsewhere in the journal.¹⁰ We greatly value your input, which helps us to find high-quality science that makes a difference. I thank each and every one of you for your work.

Corresponding Author: Rita F. Redberg, MD, MSc, University of California, San Francisco, 505 Parnassus Ave, M1180, San Francisco, CA 94143-0124 (rita.redberg@ucsf.edu).

Published Online: March 20, 2023. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2022.6198

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Redberg reported grant support from Arnold Ventures, The Greenwall Foundation, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for work unrelated to JAMA Internal Medicine.