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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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