Medical Education

Policy Statements

Medical Education Editorial policy statements

The journal’s mission statement
Medical Education is an international, peer-reviewed, journal with distribution to readers in more than 80 countries. The journal seeks to enhance its position as the pre-eminent journal in the field of education for health care professionals and aims to publish material of the highest quality reflecting world wide or provocative issues and perspectives. The contents will be of interest to learners, teachers and researchers, and, potentially, have a significant impact on scholarship in medical education and, ultimately, on the quality of health care.

The journal welcomes papers on any aspect of health professional education. While the predominant emphasis in Medical Education has been on work related to the education of doctors and medical students, papers from other health professions and papers on interprofessional education are encouraged. In deciding which papers to publish we prioritize work that offers a fundamental and substantive advance in understanding of issues related to health professional education and, as such, do not generally publish quality assurance studies as full reports if directed dominantly at testing the effectiveness of any particular course/curriculum/teaching resource. Rather, authors interested in disseminating innovative and interesting ideas in these domains should consider the ‘Really Good Stuff’ section of our journal as a potential outlet.

Ethical standards
Medical Education’s policy on ethical standards is based on the ‘Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals’, a document issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. The complete document is published in Medical Education 1999; 33: 66-78 and can be viewed at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1365-2923. In addition, Medical Education is also in active discussion with other leading journals concerning ethical standards, and conforms to current standards of practice recommended by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the European Association of Science Editors (EASE).

We expect ethics approval to have been sought from an appropriate body, such as an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Independent Ethics Committee (IEC), where such bodies exist to review educational research. All work involving research on human subjects must comply with the Declaration of Helsinki (http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/).

Both the manuscript itself and details concerning ethics approval input by the submitting author should indicate the outcome of the application, even when the decision was that no ethical approval was required. Where no formal framework for ethical approval is currently available, please provide a statement confirming if ethical considerations were made by a qualified person outside the group directly involved in work reported in this paper.

There should also be a statement confirming the following points: That the work was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, including, but not limited to there being no potential harm to participants, the anonymity of participants is guaranteed, and the informed consent of participants was obtained. See Med Educ 2009;43:194-5.

The views expressed in Medical Education are not necessarily those of its parent Association, ASME, nor of its publisher, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, which accord complete editorial freedom to the Editor in Chief and Editorial Team.

Appeals
The Editor in Chief always replies to authors who query or appeal decisions concerning publication of their manuscripts. Each case is considered individually and, where appropriate, the Editor in Chief discusses the case with the Deputy/Associate Editor concerned before replying.

However, authors should remember that the Editor in Chief bears many factors in mind when deciding a paper’s priority for publication. These include such matters as the editorial direction of the journal, the relevance of the paper to the general readership of the journal and its importance to an international audience. Referees make judgements on the paper’s originality, academic rigour and importance but it is not their role to make summative judgements on publication matters. The Editor in Chief is not only at liberty, but has a duty to put the interests of the journal’s readership and the academic community at large before those of any individual author. On these matters, therefore, the Editor in Chief’s decision is usually final.

Authors who wish to appeal a decision should send a clearly-worded letter to the Editor in Chief explaining why they believe that the journal should continue to consider their paper. It is insufficient to simply to say that the reviews were positive as the expert reviews received form only part of the decision-making process as explained previously. A case needs to be made for the academic significance of the paper, or information given about why negative reviews should have been treated with more caution. Suggestions may be made about how the authors plan to improve their paper. Where authors are able to make a good case, the Editor in Chief will be happy to seek further review of the paper.

Outright rejection
All manuscripts are read by at least one internal reviewer. Following that initial review, as of 2010, roughly half of all manuscripts submitted to Medical Education are sent for external review, but the remainder are rejected outright. This is done to ensure that the gracious and voluntary efforts provided by the journal’s external reviewers are put to best use. Common reasons for papers not being sent out for review are that they do not fit the journal’s focus as outlined in the above mission statement, a fatal methodological flaw is apparent, or the scope of the article is too narrow (conceptually, geographically, or with respect to health professional specialty) to be of interest to a large portion of the broad readership of Medical Education. We do not have the resources to supply a full review to all authors whose work falls in these categories.

Peer review
Papers that are considered to have potential for publication in Medical Education are submitted to a more extensive peer review that may be conducted internally amongst members of the editorial team, but more often are sent to a group of qualified peers from the field at large. Details regarding how peer review is conducted can be found in the Guidelines for Reviewers and both authors and reviewers are encouraged to review this document. See Med Educ 2009;43:2-4.

Allegations of author misconduct
Where apparent author misconduct is reported to the Editor in Chief (or suspected as a result of the various checks made and reports run on prior publications), the Editor in Chief will carry out appropriate investigations. If confirmed, the Editor in Chief will report the allegation to the author concerned and ask for an explanation. If the reply is unsatisfactory or further investigation is indicated, the Editor in Chief may seek further advice and information from other parties, protecting the identity of the author where possible. These other parties may include members of the journal’s editorial executive, the publisher’s lawyers, the Chairs of ASME and/or COPE, and the journal’s Quality and Standards Advisory Group.

Such external consultation will absolutely take place in the case of serious allegations such as scientific fraud. If misconduct is proved, the Editor in Chief may report the incident to the author’s institution and, where necessary, arrange for a retraction to be published in the Journal. In accordance with COPE Guidelines, serious incidents will be reported to the individual’s Head of Department/institution/relevant professional body.

Allegations of editorial misconduct
Should such an allegation arise, it will be referred to the Chair of the Editorial Board, the journal’s Quality and Standards Advisory Group (see Med Educ 2005;39:760) and to the journal’s Joint Board of Management for independent investigation.

Authorship
A brief description of authorship is given in the ‘Uniform Guidelines for Biomedical Journals’ (Vancouver Group Guidelines 2001). Medical Education bases its own definition of authorship on these guidelines, which state that authorship may only be attributed if all of the following three conditions are met:
1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
3) final approval of the version to be published.

Single tasks such as the acquisition of funding, the collation of data, general supervision of the research group or copy-editing, do not by themselves justify authorship. Those who have contributed to the paper in these or similar ways, but who do not meet all three authorship requirements, should be listed separately within the acknowledgements with their contributions outlined. It is expected that authors will seek and receive permission to publish the names of individuals in their acknowledgements prior to submission.

Those whose participation in the paper was restricted to basic clerical tasks such as typing, or whose contribution was in a supporting role such as the loan of facilities or provision of funding should be listed in the Acknowledgements section.

One author must agree to be the corresponding author. One author, not necessarily the corresponding author must agree to be the guarantor for the paper. The order in which the names of the authors appear should generally reflect the relative contributions to the project as a whole, the first author generally being the Principal Investigator and author of the first draft and the last author often being the Senior Author who provided considerable conceptual oversight/methodological expertise to the project. Guest authorship or authorship based on the provision of resources is absolutely unacceptable.

Authors’ editors and translators
Medical Education welcomes papers by authors from countries all over the world. In 2010, papers were received from authors in over 60 different countries worldwide. We never reject a paper just because the English in which it is written is not fluent, but we do not have the resources to offer extensive editing facilities to authors who have difficulties with written English. We therefore encourage authors whose first language is not English to seek the services of a professional translation service, or to seek the advice of a colleague who is familiar with preparing English-language manuscripts for publication, before they submit their paper to Medical Education. Such contributors should always be mentioned in the acknowledgments section and the part they have played in preparing the manuscript should be outlined.

Conflict of Interest
A conflict of interest exists when professional judgement concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by secondary interests (personal matters such as financial gain, personal relationships or professional rivalry). All parties involved in the writing, assessment and selection of papers for publication – authors, reviewers and editors – are required to make a clear declaration to the Editorial Office where there is a potential conflict of interest. Authors are required to reveal conflicts of interest at submission. If their paper is accepted, their statements will be published.

Review of Editors’ papers
Some general medical journals do not allow editors to submit their own work. Medical Education is the leading journal in a specialist field and we cannot afford to refuse work from high quality researchers just because they may also be our editors. Nor should we deny our editors the right to publish in the best journal.

Where the author-editor is a Deputy Editor, the paper shall proceed through the normal review process with Editor-in-Chief conducting an initial review and a Deputy Editor who is not included in the authorship team conducting a second review that incorporates the input of external peer reviewers.

Where the author-editor is the Editor-in-Chief, one of the deputy editors will be assigned by the Editorial Office to act as the Editor-in-Chief with full decision-making authority. The Deputy Editor assigned to the paper, upon securing a peer review, will send a decision based on the reviewers’ reports directly to the corresponding author. The author-editor will not be involved in the decision to publish and will not have access to any information from the review process that is not routinely made available to any author who has submitted to the journal.

Following acceptance, decisions on whether to commission a commentary or editorial based on the paper should be taken by the Editor in Chief when he is not the author or, where he is an author, by the Deputy/Associate assigned to the paper.

Priority for publication is decided by the Deputy/Associate Editor assigned to the paper in consultation with the Editorial Office.