STD—Mentor to Me…and Many

In 1998, I submitted a sole-author manuscript to Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD). I was fresh out of training as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and a recent recipient of an MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was intent on educating the sexually transmitted infections (STIs) research community about the nuances of clinical epidemiology. The paper, addressing the importance of chlamydial infection (chlamydia) prevalence when screening for chlamydia in women, was a combination thought piece and methods paper. I was pretty proud of myself. A few weeks later, the reviews came (in the mail, of course). Five reviewers weighed in. And those 5 reviewers had given me, roughly, 15 pages of comments. The comments were longer than the paper. In all my years of publishing papers, those comments were the most…complete, shall we say…of any paper I have ever written. Although I never asked Julie Schachter, the Editor-in-Chief, about the rationale for the 5 reviews, I am convinced that the reason was that he saw merit in what I was saying and, after a lukewarm review or two, sought other opinions for adjudication. Despite the effort required to respond to that many comments, I was thankful as the paper was ultimately published1 and garnered substantial attention from more senior people who stopped me at a subsequent conference to ask me questions about it. In that same year, I published another sole author publication critiquing a controversial (to me at least) method, discrepant analysis, that was being used to evaluate new nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs) for chlamydia and gonorrhea. I decided to write that critique after Ward Cates, then president of Family Health International, gave me a paper written by Alula Hadgu.2 Ward asked me what I thought. So, I read the paper, reflected on the statistical speak in Hadgu's paper, and decided that I would translate it for the STI microbiological community. My paper was published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.3 At the time, I did not know that Drs. Hadgu and Schachter had had a heated exchange at a recent conference about discrepant analysis. A few months later that year, I received a request to write an editorial4 in Clinical Infectious Diseases for a paper that I had reviewed.5 That paper had used discrepant analysis, and I had been critical in my review. In the editorial invitation, I learned that the editorial format would be in a point-counterpoint format. The problem was that the counterpoint would be written by Julie Schachter, STD Editor-in-Chief, discrepant analysis proponent, and giant in the STI field.6 My first thought, and a persistent one, was that writing this editorial could ruin my career. It did not. As the editor-in-chief, Julie Schachter was committed to mentorship. His response to my editorial was not adversarial. Instead, he acknowledged my points but also noted where he disagreed. From that first paper and the editorial, he recognized my potential to contribute to our field. He began sending papers for me to review. At conferences, he would seek me out and check how I was faring. In 2003, he asked me to become an editorial board member. In 2011, he asked me to become an associate editor, a position I had to decline because our friendly rival, Sexually Transmitted Infections, had asked me to join them as an associate editor just weeks before. Fortunately, he forgave my betrayal, and 4 years later asked me to assume the editor-in-chief position upon his retirement from the journal. Those were some gigantic shoes to fill. Throughout the 50-year history of STD, the editors and editorial board have prioritized the development of early career professionals. We have actively sought early career professionals as reviewers for papers and rewarded those folks with offers to become members of the editorial board. Our goal in making these appointments has always been to offer these early career folks something to point to during promotion as well as an opportunity to engage with more established folks at the annual board meetings. In more recent years, we have awarded an annual prize to the best STD paper by an early career investigator.7–11 Although this award was started on my watch at the journal, I know that Dr. Schachter supported the concept. It fit perfectly with his vision of the professional purpose of the journal. As we reflect on the impact of STD over these 50 years, its impact as a mentor to many cannot be understated. We strive to provide reviews that are constructive, even when we must reject the manuscript. We work to see papers through the review process that have merit, even when it takes an extra round or two of reviews to get them to the finish line. And we actively look for opportunities to support those people who are early in their career and are considering working in the STI field. So, can a journal be a mentor? Yes, it can, if all of the people behind the scenes collectively seek to make mentorship a priority. Thank you to all of the STD community that has made mentorship a priority—for me and all the rest of us.