Annals at 80: Still Young and Still Reaching Out

This issue marks the beginning of the 80th year of publishing Annals of Internal Medicine. We hope our readers think that this octogenarian looks far younger than its chronological age. However, out of deference to the prerogatives of age, we present a modest celebration: a selective look forward at our strategy for remaining vital far into the future. People who stay vibrant well into old age stay connected with the world around them—think of a grandparent who learns to use such technologies as e-mail and instant messaging to stay connected with family and friends. Likewise, one of our main strategies for Annals involves embracing new technologies and formats to reach the public, clinicians, researchers, educators, and policymakers in timely and effective ways.

The public needs medical journals to be reliable sources of information about health care, and medical journals have always functioned as a public trust. Winnowing and truth-telling are a journal's most important contributions to society. We sift though vast amounts of research to find articles that are timely, novel, relevant to practice, and true. For every research article that we publish, we reject 13. But choosing what to publish is the easy part. Most manuscripts require several rounds of revision. At Annals, the process adds up to several tens of hours of a senior editor's and statistician's time per manuscript, not to mention the time spent …