STD and Me

Early in my career in the late 1980s, my mentor Frank Judson encouraged me to become a reviewer for Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD). As he suggested, it would enhance my critical reading skills and make me a better writer. I will leave it to my peers to judge whether these intended outcomes were achieved, but I did enjoy the review process that, along with my first articles, marked the beginning of my relationship with the Journal. I later joined the Journal's Editorial Board and, in 2008 the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) at the time, Julie Schachter asked me to become an Associate Editor (AE). The AE's job is pretty straightforward. Manuscripts submitted to the journal are first seen by the EiC (Bill Miller) who rejects a fair number of them after initial review, and for the remainder then selects an AE most familiar with the article's topic area. The AE reads the manuscript and either rejects or sends out for review to members of the Editorial Board or outside reviewers. Based on the reviews and the judgment by AE and EiC, the article is then rejected or accepted without or, most commonly, with revisions. If the revisions are found to be acceptable by the AE and EiC, the article will be accepted for publication. Occasionally, an article may be sent out for re-review if the revisions are extensive. As an AE, you thus see a sizeable number of articles that will ultimately appear in the Journal, and consequently this work makes you contemplate the place of the Journal in the field of sexually transmitted infections (STI). With a limited readership and a modest “impact factor,” STD is often thought of as a “secondary” journal, i.e., only considered when submission of a publication to a more prestigious journal is unlikely to make it through their review process or has been rejected. This creates an unfortunate vicious circle: if researchers only publish their second-tier articles in a journal with a low impact factor, then the journal will be perceived as second-tier and thus attracting more second-tier submissions, solidifying the impact factor at a low level. However, I believe there are major limitations to judging a journal only by its impact factor, which is basically calculated on the number of times an article is cited in the peer-reviewed literature in a given period. Although this measure tells you something about the standing of an article among scientific peers, it does not tell you much about its scientific value per se or its impact in the real world. Over the past 10 years, I have been exploring this a bit further. First, the scientific value. When the 2015 STI Treatment Guidelines were issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it occurred to me that this is probably the best-researched document in our field involving over 100 scientists, clinicians, and public health personnel scouring the available evidence to support the scientific base of the Guidelines. Therefore, the literature referenced in the document should give you a pretty good sense of the state-of-the science at the time that the Guidelines are released, especially in the areas of diagnosis and treatment. Thus, I started to look at the 2015 reference list more closely and repeated this analysis a bit more formally for the 2021 Guidelines. Bill Miller and I published the results 2 years ago in the journal.1 The bottom line is that STD was the most cited journal in Guidelines, and the competition was not even close. In 2021, out of 304 unique sources, almost 13% of 1454 citations came from our Journal compared with 8% from Clinical Infectious Diseases and 6% from Sexually Transmitted Infections. Obviously not every citation carries the same weight and some of the “weightier” articles may have come from other journals, but I think it is fair to say that our Journal contributes greatly to our scientific field, and I personally take great pride in the (admittedly few) articles I published in the Journal that made it to the Guidelines' reference lists! I hope that my colleagues and especially younger investigators will agree with these considerations and submit their best work to the Journal. Then, secondly, our field is not just comprised of scientists and clinicians, but also a large public health work force at local, state, and federal levels. They look to the Journal for programmatic guidance and conversely submit articles on program innovations and practice evaluations, such as delivery and outcomes of partners services by disease intervention specialists (DIS), the roll-out of expedited partner treatment or the streamlining of clinical practice by offering express visits. Our Journal is a unique platform for these types of articles that are also less likely to be considered by competing journals. Realizing the potential importance of these articles to the program field, we initiated a special section of the Journal, “The Real World of STD Prevention” in 2013,2 selecting relevant articles that are offered free of charge through the Journal's website. We believe that this has stimulated a growing interest in programmatic evaluation and research from both readers and authors in the STI-focused public health field and will continue to do so. Finally, as the guest editor of this special anniversary issue, I was impressed by the breadth and depth of the essays and the enthusiasm of the contributors, all with impressive (past) or promising (future) careers, demonstrating the love and commitment they feel for the Journal. I feel very grateful and proud to be a part of that community.