Discovery - Primary Care Research

Journals are an important part of the medical profession (and really any profession that seeks to grow through mutual collaboration and accountability). There are many medical journals and each has their own flavor and a different set of standards which must be met to have your research or commentary published in the journal. This is excellent. In one way it is as great as having different channels on television (only generally more educational) - tune into the ones you want, DVR the rest for a rainy day. The myriad venues for publication also leaves any ambitious professional with the sense that there IS a place to share their original thoughts and to make connections where original seeds can be synthesised into great accomplishments thus furthering the scope and the efficacy of the healing arts. I hope to make many such contributions in the future.

I am sure to do intro blogs on many journals and later on I may put the spot light on some specific articles that I find particularly compelling. For today I would like to shine the light on the journal for Osteopathic Medicine and Primary Care. They are self described as

"an open access, peer-reviewed online journal that encompasses all aspects of family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology. The journal also covers health service and public health research that addresses primary care."

Things I found noteworthy on first glance:

• Access to all of their articles is free. Many (I believe most) journals put a significant amount of energy into the organization and lay out of a print version of their publication. OM-PC is an exclusively electronic publication and through placement of...well semi relevant ads on their website is able to provide it for free. Worth the giant pfizer banner across the top of the screen? I think so.
• They are based out of Ft Worth and have what seems to be a strong relationship with the University of North Texas Health Science Center (Which on a side note is quickly becoming one of my top picks for schools). The Editor In Chief of the journal I believe also teaches at UNT-HSC.
• To post an article a relatively standard procedure of peer review and resubmittal is done, but on the whole they keep their publication time very low. (months compared to years)
• Publication in the journal makes your research searchable (and findable) on not only PubMed (the largest and most popular bibliographical search engine) but four others as well.
• Besides these great features I just really appreciate that they are providing a venue for and thus encouraging exploration in the field of primary care (with specially attention to Osteopathy). This is a field that has been seeing decline in recent years due to the increasing disparity between that field and more specialized fields. This decline may in part be due to the relatively slow pace of research and improvement as compared to that of the subspecialties. This article in particular gave me great hope.