JCHIMP 7th anniversary.

With this issue, we complete volume 7 of the Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives – JCHIMP. In this perspective piece, we will briefly review the history of the journal and its raison d’etre. The Annals of Internal Medicine recently celebrated its 90th birthday. We are celebrating JCHIMP’s 7th. We will discuss recent changes related to our publisher change at the end of volume 6.

Journal history

JCHIMP was conceived at the Minneapolis national meeting of the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine during its Community Hospital Assembly in 2010. With the expert guidance of David Solomon [1], a pioneer in medical electronic publishing, we selected our publisher – Co-action Publishing of Stockholm, Sweden. Our first issue was posted in 2011 and was largely a Baltimore operation [2].

We experienced excellent growth almost immediately and saw a rapidly expanding readership. After the first few years, there were some transitions for the journal editorial leadership. The editor (Robert Ferguson) changed institutional bases in Baltimore, from Union Memorial Hospital to Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC). These changes led to a slowdown in our growth rate in 2013 and 2014. The new arrangements and logistics transiently reduced the number of issues and publications. The associate editor, Richard Alweis, also relocated from Reading, PA, to Rochester, NY, in 2016. In moving to Rochester as DIO, the journal was able to add that system’s sponsorship. The other major change that came to pass was the publisher transfer to Taylor and Francis, a large organization based in the UK and other European countries. The transfer caused significant delays in publications early in 2017 and was partially responsible for the drop in publication numbers as the delays in processes caused some authors to withdraw (Table 1). We telescoped publication dates later in the year in order to meet our self-imposed quota of six issues in 2017. Looking ahead, we expect a normal every 2 months’ publication cycle in 2018, starting with February.

Table 1.

JCHIMP no. of manuscripts and issues per year.

Year	No. of manuscripts	No. of issues per year
2011	31	4
2012	41	4
2013	30	3 (due to Hiatus)
2014	60	5
2015	90	6
2016	110	6
2017	90 estimated	6

Open access publishing and JCHIMP

Electronic open access publishing has many advantages over the paper medium. It is much faster and less expensive to produce. From the beginning, under Dr Solomon’s guidance, we have stayed with this approach [3]. Although some in the electronic medium recommend immediate publication of accepted manuscripts [4] as soon as they are type set, we maintain ‘issue publications’. We believe, as does the JCHIMP editorial board, that the majority of health care professionals prefer receiving their scientific journals that way. Although bad timing can lead to month long delays, it is still much faster than paper (R4). And when the timing is fortuitous, it can be amazingly efficient. One recent example demonstrated this. We were approached in August 2017 about publishing a manuscript dealing with a survey of 2016 applicants to the internal medicine fellowship match. The 10 authors wanted to expedite publication if possible so that the survey information would be published before the current 2017 fellowship process was completed. The manuscript was published in October, volume 7# 5, less than 3 months after it was initially submitted.

Publication statistics

With this issue containing 11 papers, we have now published 447 manuscripts in 7 years of existence in 35 issues. Our acceptance rate in 2017 as of mid-November is 74%. We expect in 2018 to exceed our previous high of 110. It is exciting to see the variety and locations of the authors – from 15 states and 3 foreign countries (Table 2).

Table 2.

Institutions published in JCHIMP in 2017.

Abington Jefferson Health, PA		San Joaquin General Hospital, CA
Easton Hospital, PA		St. Francis Medical Center, NJ
Greater Baltimore Medical Center, MD		St. Louis University, IL
Guthrie Robert Packer Hospital, PA		St. Luke’s Hospital, MO
Hurley Medical Center, MI		Trinitas Regional Medical Center, NJ
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY		Trios Health
Interfaith Medical Center, NY		Universal College of Medical Sciences, PA
Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, NY		University of Alberta, Canada
John T. Mather Memorial Hospital, NY		University of California San Diego, CA
Maryland ACP		University of Central Florida, FL
Medizinische Universitat Graz – Austria		University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria, IL
MedStar Harbor Hospital, MDNew York Presbyterian Hospital, NY		University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics, IA
New York University SOM, NYOSF St. Francis Medical Center, IL		University of Maryland, MD
Reading Health Systems, PA		University of Mississippi Medical Center, MS
Rochester Regional Health, NY		University of Tennessee, TN
Saba University		University of Texas Medical Branch @ Galveston
Saint Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, OH		UPMC MercyVirginia Tech Carilion SOM, VA

With the transition to the new publishing platform now completed, we are better able to track article downloads for our papers. During the first quarter of this year, as the platform was continuing its development process, article downloads were down from historical norms, but had returned to pre-transition levels during Quarter 3, with 14,508 article downloads during those 3 months. We anticipate further growth during Quarter 4 and achieving new record levels for the journal. Citations of papers in the journal are also on the rise, and our work has been featured in a wide variety of highly respected journals, such as Academic Medicine, American Journal of Emergency Medicine, American Surgeon, Annals of Internal Medicine, BMC Medical Education, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Eye, Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research, Journal of Graduate Medical Education, and Medical Teacher to name just a few. JCHIMP is now indexed in the Clarivate (formerly Thomson Reuters) Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). After 18 months in the ESCI, a journal is automatically reviewed, and, if the citation activity is significant, it will then be included in the JCR, and given an official impact factor. The journal is in a good position to achieve this status at the time of the review, and speaks to the high quality of the work published here.

Peer review

A most important part of any peer review journal is the peer-review process which is a major influence on a journal’s editorial practices. We now have in excess of 600 individuals on our active peer reviewer list. Many are residents and medical students who have not previously worked in the peer-review process (Table 3).

Table 3.

JCHIMP peer reviewers, 2017.

Ana Abaroa Salvatierra

Imad Abdulmajeed

Mohammad AbuHishmeh

Khalid Abusaada

Amesh Adalja

Amitesh Agarwal

Manyoo Agarwal

Sharjeel Ahmad

Badr Othman AlBadr

Chuck Albrecht

Osman Ali

Hassan Alkhawam

Ahmed Al-khazraji

Yanal Alnimer

Richard Alweis

Karla Arce

Nobuhiro Ariyoshi

Hamza Aurakzai

Fred Balis

Babar Bashir

Talha Bashir

Sijan Basnet

Karen Beekman

Ewelina Biskup

Patrick Brine

Dolores Buscemi

Wayne Campbell

Lucien Cardinal

Stephanie Chan

Lawrence Cheung

Chester Choi

Dobbin Chow

John Cmar

Ricardo Conti

Gordon Crabtree

Stefan David

Janaki Deepak

Anthony Donato

Jennifer Dooley

Shideh Doroudi

Ryan Steven D’Souza

Abhiram Duvvuri

Asher Edwards

Ahmed Elantably

Emmanuel Elueze

Margaret Eng

Alex Essenmacher

Robert Ferguson

Laurel Fick

Paul Foster

Andrew Frei

Ethan Fried

Joseph Fuscaldo

Sonal Gandhi

Vishnu Garla

George Waldon Garriss

Ibrahim Ghobrial

Julieta Gilson

Venkata Subhash Gorrepati

Sunil Goyal

Gaurav Gulati

Mohammadali Habibi

Ali Haq

Che Harris

Duosha Hu

Tom Hu

Rajasekhar Jagarlamudi

Elie Jean

Meherwan B Joshi

Alan Kaell

Aditya Kalakonda

Yugandhar Kandimalla

Apurwa Karki

Hameem I Kawsar

Jason Kliiger

Ajay Koirala

Victor Kolade

Mahesh Krishnamurthy

Irena Kuca

Sapna Kuehl

Dongyan Liu

John Wesley Logan

Srinivasa Madhavan

Bader Madoukh

Naba Mainali

Srikrishna Malayala

Jayaprakash Manda

Jayadev Manikkam Umakanthan

Henry Meilman

Janet Memark

Ida Micaily.

Izza Mir

Dimitra Mitsani

Penchala Mittadodla

Mahsa Mohebtash

Nargiz Nargiz Muganlinskaya

Marc Mugmon

Sada Mustafa

Monica Mutyala

Swaroopa Nalamalapu

Salik Nazir

Swathi Nemani

Binh Nguyen

Yuliya Nudelman

FNU Nutan

Abdillahi Omar

David Joshua Ozeri

Zahra Pakbaz

Phil Panzarella

Kinnari Parikh

Sarah Park

Richard Pomerantz

Resham Poudel

Salil Rajayer

Rajarajeshwari Ramachandran

Zahra Rezvani

Jaclyn Rivington

Timothy Ryan

Peter Saikali

Fardad Sarabchi

Emily Schehlein

Sarah A Schmalzle

Simranjit Sekhon

Syed Raza Shah

Ankita Shashidhar

Chirag Sheth

Mansur Shomali

Nazia Siddiqui

David Gary Smith

Shauna Thariath

Jayaram Thimmapuram

Jack Tomen

Dena Tran

Nay Tun

Patrick Twohig

Hakim Uqdah

Ahsan Wahab

David Weisman

Manajyoti Yadav

Jessica Young

Amr Youssef

Inexperienced reviewers are guided in the process [5]. We make certain to not ask them to do more than that of which they are capable. A good review is time-consuming when done carefully and thoughtfully. We don’t want to overburden any individual reviewer. Having the critical mass of reviewers that we now have allows us to limit most reviewers to no more than two requests per year. We have also compacted our review times from three weeks to two. This allows us to move on to alternate reviewers if necessary sooner.