J Dent Educ. 71(6): 705-707 2007
© 2007 American Dental Education Association
A Note from the Editor
Dr. Olav Alvares, Editor
I am pleased to present the following report on the Journal of Dental Education for 2006.
- Statistics on Journal Operations
- Number of submissions. The number of submissions continues to increase. For 2006, we received 214 submissions, which represents a 7 percent increase over 2005 (n=200) and is significantly higher than the 100 submissions in the year 2000 when I became the Editor. Judging by the number of submissions these past two years, it seems that we may have stabilized around 200 submissions a year. Although maybe not—as in the first ninety-five days of 2007 we already have eighty-two submissions, so you can do the math! Parenthetically, the journal’s Managing Editor, Lynn Page Whittaker, is now operating out of her native state of Georgia, but thanks to Lynn’s abilities and modern information technology, the publication process has continued to proceed very smoothly.
- Number of articles published. In 2006 we published 130 articles (compared to seventy-seven articles in 2005). This number included twenty-three articles that constituted the proceedings of a symposium titled "Professional Promises: Hopes and Gaps in Access to Oral Health Care," organized by Dr. Frank Catalanotto and Dr. Don Patthoff, and published as the November issue. (By the way, the ADA has ordered fifty copies of that issue.) Altogether, this was a record number of articles published in any given year in the history of the JDE. In comparison, Academic Medicine published 157 articles in 2006 (with a core full-time staff of at least six people), but the issue and volume page counts are now roughly equivalent for the two journals. The November issue was bundled with a supplement titled "Global Health Through Women’s Leadership," the proceedings of the Third International ADEA Women’s Leadership Conference, held in Montreal, Canada, August 2005. Overall, submissions to the JDE came from many parts of the world—United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Australia. We are now a multinational operation. Managing Editor Lynn Whittaker compiled some interesting statistics regarding the JDE, as follows. Three hundred and fifty-four authors were published in the 2006 volume: twenty of those were students—by far the largest number we’ve published in a year; around 250 were faculty and administrators in academic dental institutions; thirteen were faculty in medical schools; thirty-five were faculty in university schools or departments other than dental or medical schools; and twelve identified themselves as dental practitioners. The largest number of contributions came from (in order): University of Michigan, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, New York University, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and University of Florida.
- Acceptance rate. Forty-seven percent of the submissions were accepted for publication, the same as in 2005; 2 percent were found to be unacceptable for publication in their present form and were returned to their authors for revision; 33 percent (as compared to 36 percent in 2005) were rejected for publication; and 16 percent are being processed.
- Other submission information. The duration from the date of submission to being accepted for publication has remained steady at three months for the past six years. With respect to the manuscripts accepted for publication, the peer reviewers continue to give, on average, a "good" rating on a scale of "excellent-good-fair-poor."
- Number of peer reviewers. There was a huge increase in the number of peer reviewers from 149 in 2004 to 270 in 2006. This suggests that an increasing number of individuals are interested in contributing in some fashion to the journal operations. I am indeed truly indebted to each and every one of these individuals for their assistance, which was acknowledged in the December 2006 issue.
- Annual JDE Awards for Best Article
In an attempt to encourage junior faculty/students to publish in the JDE, ADEA recognizes individuals for the best article in the various sections of the journal. The award consists of a plaque and a $250 cash prize. At the opening session of the 2007 ADEA Annual Session in New Orleans, the following individuals were recognized in the specified sections for the year 2006:- Educational Methodologies: Dr. Kristin Zakariasen Victoroff, "Students’ Perceptions of Effective Learning Experiences in Dental School";
- Milieu in Dental School and Practice: Dr. Reem Haj-Ali, "Rater Reliability: Short- and Long-Term Effects of Calibration Training";
- Critical Issues in Dental Education: Dr. Mina H. Chung, "Dental and Medical Students’ Knowledge and Opinions of Infant Oral Health";
- International Dental Education: Dr. Ajay S. Mahal, "Implications of the Growth of Dental Education in India"; and
- From the Students’ Corner: Mr. James M. Rogér, "A Survey of Dual-Degree Training Opportunities at U.S. Dental Schools."
There were not enough articles authored by junior faculty to warrant a competition in the other sections.
- New Initiatives
At the ADEA Annual Session in New Orleans, on Monday, March 19, 2007, at the suggestion of JDE Editorial Review Board (ERB) member Dr. Richard Masella, the journal sponsored a program—a first in its history. The program was titled "Educational Leadership" and consisted of two parts: 1) "Predoctoral or Predental Biomedical Sciences" (speakers: Drs. Dominick DePaola and Denis Lynch); and 2) "Learning More and More About Less and Less in Postgraduate Dental Education" (speakers: Drs. Anthony Iacopino and Charles Shuler). The two speakers for each of the two topics followed a point-counterpoint format.
ADEA Associate Executive Director for Knowledge Management Sue Sandmeyer organized an online chat/discussion on April 11 of Dr. Masella’s article "Renewing Professionalism in Dental Education: Overcoming the Market Environment," which appeared in the February 2007 issue. Following this first online chat with a JDE author, the plan is to have two such sessions per year.
The JDE is now available for online continuing education credit. ADEA is an ADA CERP provider. Each month an article from the JDE will be posted at www.adea.org. Members will also have access to the ADEA JDE Online Library, where additional courses from leading universities and key opinion leaders are available. Currently, the online library offers over eighty courses in both text and audio-video formats in an easy to view form. Personal course activity and certificates will be maintained in members’ own online member history. If you’ve developed a course that you’d like to see posted, contact Sue Sandmeyer. We hope that you enjoy the education and convenience of this new ADEA member benefit.
- Perspectives Series Sponsored by the ADEA Commission on Change and Innovation (CCI)
JDE Associate Editor Bill Hendricson is coordinating a series of CCI-sponsored papers, some authored by members of the CCI and some by other distinguished educators. Several have already been published, and others are in the pipeline. The purposes of this series are to raise awareness in the dental education community of various challenges and opportunities for academic dentistry and to stimulate dialogue about future directions for the dental school curriculum. According to Hendricson, several of these articles are intended to serve as white papers that summarize the literature related to specific topics and present best practices.
- ADEA Open Membership, New Institutional Members, and the Online JDE
According to Jane Hamblin, ADEA Associate Executive Director for Member Services, as a result of open membership, ADEA currently has 16,000 members, with a 70 percent renewal rate so far for 2007. Approximately thirty affiliate member programs have been added since the inception of open membership. Overall registration for the 2007 ADEA Annual Session was approximately 1900. The online JDE receives approximately 50,000 hits per month, and weekly access requests have increased by 135 percent over the past two years.
- JDE Advertising and Subscriptions
Merideth Menken, ADEA Director of Publications, reported that advertising is now being secured and placed in the online JDE and the goal is to expand online advertising. At the recent ERB meeting, there was a discussion of how the online version of the JDE has influenced the actual reading of the journal and general awareness among academic dentists and other potential readers.
- Editorial Review Board
The terms of Drs. Botto, DeRouen, Karimbux, and Panagakos expired on March 1, 2007. I express my sincerest thanks for their generous assistance and support. At the January 2007 meeting, the ADEA Board of Directors approved the appointments of Drs. Behar-Horenstein, Killip, and Cederberg as new members of the ERB for a three-year term commencing March 1, 2007. A hearty welcome aboard to these new members!
- Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)
When I stepped in as Editor, I found to my utter dismay that ISI had dropped the JDE from its annual "scientific impact" analysis. I don’t know the reason(s) why it was dropped, but publishing in a journal with a good scientific impact is of considerable importance for junior faculty who are up for promotion and tenure. Several of us, including Lynn Whittaker, Sue Sandmeyer, and former ERB member Paula O’Neill, have attempted over the past five years to have the JDE reinstated by ISI in its annual scientific analysis but to no avail—telephone calls and emails went unanswered. In the past year, I had a fortuitous conversation on this issue with one of our librarians at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, who in turn had contact with an individual at ISI. As of October 2006, each month we have been sending a copy of the JDE to this individual. So we are finally in communication with them! A key item as far as ISI is concerned is the timeliness of the publication, and I imagine we will fare well in this respect judging by our current track record. At this point, I don’t know how long it will take for ISI to come to a decision.
Finally, I am grateful for the tremendous support provided by Associate Editor William Hendricson, the ADEA Board of Directors, ADEA Executive Director Dr. Richard Valachovic, and the other members of the editorial team, especially Lynn Page Whittaker, Judy Myers, Stephen Silberman, Titus Schleyer, Jane Hamblin, Merideth Menken, and Sue Sandmeyer.
Thanks to some fine team effort, this has been a good year for the JDE, and hopefully, the best is still to come.
