As we are accelerating into 2018, I want to take a moment to thank all of our readers, authors, reviewers and, of course, my incredible team of editors for the privilege of working with all on JAMA Internal Medicine. The journal could not exist without the generosity of our reviewers, who give their time and expertise to reviewing articles and offering suggestions for improvements. Again, I have learned so much from all of you and enjoyed every minute. We are grateful and energized to have a thoughtful and accomplished group of University of California, San Francisco housestaff working with us as JAMA Internal Medicine Editorial Fellows and Elective Residents. We will soon be accepting applications for a Teachable Moments Editorial Fellow position open to internal medicine chief residents across the United States.
It is a privilege to be able to read our authors’ work. We enjoy talking with you at conferences and hearing from you—knowing that publishing in JAMA Internal Medicine opened new doors in your career makes our day. We hit a new record for submissions this year, at 2774 major manuscripts, with continued fast turnaround time (3 days), thanks to the hard work of the editors, with an overall acceptance rate of 11% and for research articles, 6% (Table). We have a high rate of rejection without review (78%). This means that authors of manuscripts that we do not publish receive a decision within a few days, and we only use our reviewers’ precious time for articles we know have a good chance of being published in our pages. We were also delighted to receive our highest impact factor ever—16.54. We are pleased to welcome JAMA Network Open to the JAMA Network. With submission to JAMA Internal Medicine, authors can now choose referral to another network journal, such as JAMA Cardiology, JAMA Oncology, and/or referral to JAMA Network Open, if rejected from JAMA Internal Medicine.
Journals live in a world of social media, and we are pleased to hear from many of you on these platforms. We are delighted that nearly 45 000 of you follow JAMA Internal Medicine on Twitter, and over 77 000 follow us on Facebook. Reflecting the broad interest in our content, we were pleased to have 3 articles1-3 on the Top 100 Altmetrics list, including the No. 3 overall for 2017—“Comparison of Hospital Mortality and Readmission Rates for Medicare Patients Treated by Male vs Female Physicians”1 (which was actually published in December 2016, but the article was still eligible because the list encompassed December 2016 to November 2017). The Altmetric score for any article is available on our website. We also had 30 778 mentions in the news and 9 million downloads of articles (Table). To keep up with the increasing pace of publishing, we have changed the deadline for submission of Letters to the Editor to 30 days after online-first publication so that we can publish correspondences in a more timely fashion. Finally, I note that we are continuing our rolling themes on Firearm Violence and Physician Work Environment and Well-Being. And I am enormously grateful to Richard Lehman, MB, for all of his work as guest editor of the Sharing Medicine series in 2017.
We want to continue publishing high-quality Original Investigations and clinical trials, as well as systematic reviews with or without meta-analyses, Evidence to Practice synopses, opinion pieces such as Viewpoints and Perspectives, and Teachable Moments from our trainees. We will continue to publish articles on the daily challenges in health care and medicine and focus on ways to improve experience for clinicians and patients, as well as approaches to improve our health care system. We could not do this without our reviewers, and I thank each and every one of you listed as 2017 JAMA Internal Medicine peer reviewers.4
Corresponding Author: Rita F. Redberg, MD, MSc, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143 (redberg@medicine.ucsf.edu).
Published Online: March 12, 2018. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.7909
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.
2.O’Donovan
G, Lee
I, Hamer
M, Stamatakis
E. Association of “weekend warrior” and other leisure time physical activity patterns with risks for all-cause, cardiovascular disease, and cancer mortality.
JAMA Intern Med. 2017;177(3):335-342. doi:
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