Endocrine Reviews 27 (1): 1
Copyright © 2006 by The Endocrine Society
Endocrine Reviews and the Examined Life
For the Editors,
R. Paul Robertson, M.D.
This journal is changing hands once again. Although its publication home remains with The Endocrine Society near Washington DC, its new editorial home is in Washington state. The new Associate Editors hail from California (Linda Giudice), Texas (David Moore), Colorado (Chip Ridgway), Illinois (Larry Jameson), and Massachusetts (Barbara Kahn), and we are fortunate to have the continued assistance of Maggie Haworth, Managing Editor. Together our goal is to maintain the extremely high level of scholarly reviews our readers have come to expect... and more.
What more can be done to enhance this journal? Popularity with readers is not an issue. It habitually enjoys the highest Thomson/ISI Impact Factor ranking of any endocrine journal in the world. Brad Thompson and his group of editors have maintained the historical excellence of this journal for the past five years. However, whether or not our subscribers truly wait at their mailbox with bated breath for its arrival is another issue. In fact, it is my feeling that internet use has adversely affected reading habits so much that the journal is cited more than it is read. This, then, is our challenge. To provide a new strategy that will entice you to open up and peruse articles before even thinking of shelving them.
You will notice that the Table of Contents is now on the front cover where you can tell at a glance what is inside. But there is more! Not immediately, but fairly soon (it typically takes 6–12 months to publish articles already in process) we hope to introduce a new, more enticing format. This will involve a thematic approach in which a topic of endocrinology is covered in great depth in each issue. This approach will likely start with a clinical case that leads into a consideration of normal physiology and pathophysiology, and
thence to biochemistry, molecular biology, and beyond. It is our hope that clinicians will enter one door and venture further into the journal than they might have otherwise, and that basic scientists will enter another door and travel the opposite direction. The overall goal is not only to catalog encyclopedic review material but also to encourage broadening of individual knowledge.
Why is this important to do? Find the answer by picking up two books, Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, both by Alan Lightman. In the former he provides a delicious treatment of a genius dreamer as he might have leisurely examined life and events from many temporal points of view. Rather like a movie run backwards and forward so that items missed are seen for the first time. A reflective sort of read. The second book electrifies the reader in the very first few pages as the protagonist charges headlong into the future at breakneck speed, barely appreciating or even recognizing what is going on around him as his mental and physical health atrophies. A classic representation of the unexamined life, as Lightman explicitly reminds us by introducing retrospective remembrances of Socrates, who warned us the unexamined life is not worth living.
So, too, with Endocrine Reviews. We want you to examine our pages, not just quote them. We want you to wander around at a leisurely pace inside our journal and not just automatically shelve it. We want you to broaden your scholarly journey as you dig deeper. We want our authors to prepare literary feasts that will whet your intellectual appetite each time we publish an issue. Our goal is for you to fill our pages with marginalia and leave our cover looking worn and tattered.
