Journals, Academics, and Pandemics

Two articles published recently in PLoS Medicine highlight the problem of how to effectively share information in the wake of a rapidly spreading disease, and prompted us to ask the question ''How well are journals doing?'' with regard to this important goal. The answer, sadly, seems to be ''not well enough.'' Although the potential of the Internet for improving the dissemination of information is now taken for granted, it would seem that the attitudes of those involved in sharing this information have not kept pace with the technology. Accordingly, it is fair to ask whether the flow of information in the face of a crisis is truly enabled by publication in medical journals (even online journals) or whether we need new avenues for rapid data sharing. An article appearing this month in PLoS Medicine by Weijia Xing and colleagues [1] dissected the publication of a subset of epidemiological papers during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003. Based on their findings, it would be hard to conclude that journal publication was a successful mechanism for rapidly sharing information. As the authors note, ''Only 22% of the studies were submitted, 8% accepted, and 7% published during the epidemic.'' What were the reasons behind these findings? The authors argue that the lack of standard methods for data collection and manuscript preparation may have played a part. In addition, despite journals' best efforts to speed up times to publication (reflected in shorter publication times compared with control articles on unrelated topics, submitted at the same time), the time to publication was over 200 days for many articles. It's not possible to know whether these delays were compounded by articles being sequentially submitted to a number of different journals before being published. But it is notable that while the 311 SARS articles were published in 137 different journals, the first ten published studies appeared in The Lancet (n = 7) and The New England Journal of Medicine (n = 3). However, the impact factors of journals publishing articles on SARS decreased significantly as time went on. Put another way, it seems that at the beginning of the epidemic, high-profile journals were willing to publish papers on SARS, but their interest waned rapidly. In addition, it is likely that, as with publishing other types of article, authors will try high-impact journals first. Fast forward to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009–10. It's too early …