“He only reads the abstracts” was once a way of casting aspersions on an academic’s work ethic. Although abstracts serve an important function in academic research, knowing the full story is important if we expect our researchers to provide the full context of how their study adds to the current body of knowledge and is worth engaging our limited attention in a busy world. In the age of social media, superficiality reigns supreme. Now, the equivalent of the academic who only reads the abstracts is the individual who only reads the tweet, who only reads (and reacts to) the title of the link, rather than the linked-to article. Vacuous statements like “I love your content!” abound on photo based social media sites where a picture is worth much less than the proverbial thousand words. Even worse than benign banality, such a system of discourse is also vulnerable to manipulation, disinformation and manufactured extremism.
In such an environment, where does the academic journal find itself? Who still values modest claims and incremental progress in a world of perpetual self-promotion and instant outrage? When such questions arise it is always heartening to me to see in the citation metrics that articles from JGLMH continue to be cited in the Policy category. Clearly someone is listening and still values evidence even if at times it seems like nobody does.
In an effort to bolster clarity in academic publishing, JGLMH is implementing a few changes going forward: We will now require structured abstracts, and also require subheadings in the Discussion section identifying Clinical Implications and Limitations.
We are also pleased to announce several new additions to our JGLMH team. We welcome to our team of Associate Editors Dr. Mark Bradley, MD, MS, of New York University and Dr. Neir Eshel, MD, PhD, of Stanford University. We also welcome six new members of our Editorial Board: Dr. Kenneth Ashley, MD, of Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, Dr. D. Andrew Tompkins, MD, of University of California San Francisco, Dr. Shelley Craig, PhD, of University of Toronto, Dr. Stewart Adelson, MD, of Columbia University, Dr. M. Paz Galupo, PhD, of Towson University, and Dr. Lin Fraser, EdD, Past President of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. These additions to our Editorial Board strengthen our multidisciplinary peer review expertise in the fields of transgender mental health, addictions psychiatry, bisexual mental health, gender and sexual minority youth, HIV psychiatry, law, social work and education.
Editor-in-chief, Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto
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