70 years of the Journal of Clinical Pathology: Quo vadis?

It is indeed an honour for me to take over the role of Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for the Journal of Clinical Pathology (JCP) in 2017. Over the past 10 years or so, I have worked with the last two EICs, Runjan Chetty (Toronto) and then latterly with Cheok Soon Lee (Sydney) and am grateful for their contributions in leading the journal to the current level and they have left big shoes to fill. In an era with the continuing proliferation of journals on a daily basis, much like neoplasms in pathology, there are immense challenges faced by both established and neo-journals alike in maintaining the captive audience and catering for needs of the readers. Another hurdle the journal is confronted with is the spread of superspecialisation and the avalanche of information the average reader is faced with. The JCP was born in a time of multidisciplinary pathology. With the advances in medicine and pathology over the decades, a natural evolutionary divergence of specialties took place. Most readers would commonly focus on monospecialist journals, although generalist/multidisciplinary journals are still extremely popular and one only needs to look at the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet as examples. Closer to home is The BMJ, a sister journal of the JCP. Having said that, there is still a role to play for the multidisciplinary pathology journal in bringing together and integrating the diverse pathology specialties because at the clinical interface, integration of diagnostic information is ultimately required for the best clinical decisions to be made for the patient. In other words, the JCP should be a choice for both the generalist and the monospecialist and should be able to satisfy diversity. In many countries, multidisciplinary pathology specialists still exist. Examples are the Anatomical pathology/Clinical pathology (AP/CP) Board certification in the USA and the Fellowship in Clinical Pathology in South Africa. Furthermore, in other low/ middle-income countries, where even monospecialists are in extremely short supply or even non-existent, the presence of a generalist-type clinical pathologist is often required and training programmes for specialists have to take this into account. So the approach for the JCP would be to try and maintain the current captive audience as well as to increase the readership from areas that are perhaps not as extensively covered but could be and to cater for the needs of residents, fellows and trainees in pathology as this cohort will become the audience of the future. How many of us still read the journals we used to read as young trainees? I am certain the percentage is very high—we are all creatures of habit. Readers are also invited to send suggestions and comments to me at [email protected]. We will conduct regular readership surveys over the next few years to analyse the needs and wants of readers. There are plans for a number of commemorative issues this year, in collaboration with the Association of Clinical Pathology (ACP) and in conjunction with ACP events that will take place in 2017. Given that a popular international currency of journal quality is citations, I thought it would be interesting to determine which were the most highly cited papers in the JCP and then follow these up with commentaries on the publications by specialists (or the original authors if possible) and an evaluation of how the area has evolved since the publication first appeared. Analysis of the citation data from the Web of Science has revealed the following data: the top five most-cited publications (order of numbers of citations) in JCP are listed below with the most cited research article being the development for a determination of urea by Fawcett and Scott (figure 1).