Send Us Your Best

This is my first editorial as the new editor of The Journal of Rheumatology. It is an honor to be only the third editor of one of the first journals in the field of Rheumatology. I am following the founding editor, Dr. Metro Ogryzlo, and the retiring editor, Dr. Duncan Gordon. It is also fitting that The Journal of Rheumatology, which has been a leader in rheumatology and a source of knowledge and investigation in all fields of this subspecialty, including pediatric rheumatology, should now have a pediatric rheumatologist as the editor.

When it became apparent that The Journal was looking for a new editor, and when I considered applying for the position, I thought about how to build on the current strengths of The Journal and look to the future. This becomes particularly important in the 21st century with the explosion of information and technology in many new journals, both in print and online. As information technologies advance and with the world going increasingly to online formats, new challenges and opportunities arise. The challenges include how to stay current and relevant with ever-changing technologies, including blogs and Twitter. However, I see these technologies as opportunities to build on the current strengths of The Journal and to expand its reach. The recent acquisition of The Journal by the Canadian Rheumatology Association has given us the opportunity to reassess all aspects of publication, including ways to make The Journal a more international journal. The first change has been to use teleconferencing to expand the editorial committee to include members outside of Toronto in particular and Canada in general. In the future I hope to increase the international flavor of the editorial board even further.

I also see new opportunities to focus and expand our current forte, which is clinical rheumatology. You will find in this edition a review article entitled “The Risky Business of Studying Prognosis”¹. This is the first of what I hope will be many articles that will allow The Journal’s readers to keep up with ever-expanding new ways to examine medical literature. In this particular issue, we will be using the expertise of clinical epidemiologists to explore how to best use the tremendous amount of information available through cohort studies. This is a particularly daunting challenge as these data are obtained from real-life cohorts, not patients following a strict protocol. However, these cohorts, although rich in clinically relevant data, have many problems including missing data and irregular visits. We will continue to publish articles on how to best examine literature in order to obtain the information relevant to the practice of rheumatology. Other new features will explore recent insights into the pathophysiology of rheumatic diseases; the clinical relevance of genome-wide association studies; and making sense of epigenetics, proteomics, and bioinformatics and whatever new technologies will be coming to us in the future. I feel that with the many technologies to study disease it is difficult to keep up with what this information truly means and how, or if, it is currently important to clinical rheumatology. I look forward to feedback from the readership on their interest in and suggestions for future topics.

An important challenge is how to best transmit all these topics, whether it is via the written page or electronically. The advantages of online access to information include ease of access, rapidity of access, and portability. However, this too presents us with new considerations, not the least of which is to maintain financial viability.

I want to thank The Journal’s Board of Directors for their confidence — and the Canadian Rheumatology Association for its blessing — in selecting me as the new editor to follow in the footsteps of some of the giants of Rheumatology — Drs. Ogryzlo and Gordon. I see this as an opportunity to enhance the outstanding reputation of The Journal and guide it through the challenges of the digital age. I want to end by adapting the motto that Duncan Gordon had for The Journal, which was “Send us some of your best.” I want to change it to “Send us your best.”