A GP with no academic credentials might be unwise to criticise apparently minor slips in the BJGP, and might himself be deemed ‘not good enough’ by that board. However, your declared editorial wish to attract and publish criticism may prompt others with quixotic and obsessional personalities to write to you, providing material for research on the serious disorder of dissent from the common view. Can the Journal be taken seriously when Edzard Ernst's interesting paper is entitled ‘Complimentary Medicine’ on the Journal's outer cover, and a similar mistake is repeated in ‘The Back Pages’? On page 24 I read that a patient is suffering from ‘blood cancer’, an expression perhaps for those lay people who have not heard of leukaemia or red cell equivalents, but not really for a medical journal.
Jennifer Marsden's clear writing retains an Americanism, ‘practice’, whereas current style in the UK might suggest the spelling ‘practise’ when used as a verb. British contributors to the New England Journal accept editorial conversion of their words to American norms. Do other readers find, ‘How this fits in’ printed as a blue highlight irritating? Why imitate the British Medical Journal? Does the Editorial Board believe that readers of the BJGP have reading difficulties, or are many papers not understandable? The first letter in the January BJGP criticises sponsorship, yet the next announces the author's success in winning an award sponsored by a private health scheme and contains the possible grammatical solecism, ‘clinical indications makes light work …’. A cynical mentor told me that the quality of a medical journal was inversely related to the quality of the paper on which it was printed. Is that why my weekly copy of the New England Journal is often exciting to read, whereas the monthly BJGP is not? Who is the BJGP written for? Sometimes it seems to be published for the referees. Could too many referees provide no editorial coherence? The extreme view, ‘Peer review, as at present constituted, encourages lying and favours the corrupt’, provocatively put by Horrobin1 almost 10 years ago, would not even reach the sub editor's desk in the present day. To mix the words of Leo Rosten's fictional character, Hyman Kaplan, and those of Private Eye some 60 years later, ‘Some mistakes netcheral — I think we should be told’.
Notes
Competing interest
A New Year's resolution to be less critical and more constructive.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2006.
