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With New Epidemiologist Editor-In-Chief, APHA Totally Revamps Its Public Health Journal

Goal Is To Make Ideas And Data More Accessible And Less Intimidating

“Publishing scientific articles is one thing, getting read is another!”

So says Alfredo Morabia, the widely-accomplished professor of epidemiology at Columbia University and Queens College and recently named Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Public Health. Morabia was describing his vision for the new completely redesigned Journal. The revamped publication, now taking on its former acronym as its official name (The AJPH), has made its first appearance in the January 2016 issue.

Changes

Morabia, who is well-known in epidemiology for his work on the history of the field, took over the helm of the Journal in mid-2015 and has added several new sections and features to the Journal in addition to completely changing the look of the publication. The goal is to facilitate access to the work of epidemiologists and other public health professionals by making it “more approachable” and “less intimidating”, he told the Monitor. “I think of the AJPH as a vector to make work accessible to a large global public,” he said.

Man of the People

Morabia has had a long standing interest in communicating more effectively about research results. He was instrumental in creating the Peoples Library of Epidemiology and is the author of Enigmas and Disease, a book intended to educate the public about epidemiology and the population level thinking that is so central to the discipline.

Need for Reform

The impetus for the drastic change has come about because the publication environment has completely changed, according to Morabia. Professionals now access articles individually rather than as part of a whole journal with multiple types of content. Journals today need to take on a new meaning and attraction for readers who “must want to use it, grab it, and look forward to receiving it,” said Morabia. For Morabia, that has meant “transforming the journal to make it lively and timely and in effect more magazine like.”

Some of the new features and sections are Perspectives, History, Policy, Law and Ethics, Methods, and Practice in addition to the research section.

Public Health of Consequence

In an editorial in the January issue, Sandro Galea of Boston University and Roger Vaughan from Columbia University announce the launch of a new section in the Journal entitled “A Public Health of Consequence”. The goal for this section, building on a previous work by Vaughan and a call by Galea for a more consequential epidemiology, will be to partner with authors to further explicate why selected articles matter for public health. AJPH will highlight consequential papers and present the papers in a clear and statistically valid manner using alternative visual means to present the results and relying less on tables and text, according to Galea and Vaughan.

Research that Matters

The authors confess they hope to push readers to consider more carefully what work is really worth doing and what criteria can be used to make that determination. Why so?

The authors share a concern that too much of the scholarship in epidemiology and public health focuses on approaches that “…cannot be considered to be particularly helpful to our cause,”— that of assuring the conditions for people to be healthy, i.e., the goal of public health. Bemoaning how much work in public health has “scant bearing on the goals of public health,” the authors make clear that “at core, we are interested in articles that tackle problems that challenge the health of populations, and that provide us, brick by brick, with the knowledge we need to better learn how we should be building better conditions that produce a healthier society.”

“Better” Knowledge

In the end, it seems clear that Galea and Vaughan believe that researchers in public health could be producing better knowledge, and this knowledge would be better not only because it is more accurate or correct, but because it is more useful, more relevant to the goal of public health.


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