Dr. White: Kelli has a very deep understanding of methodology and has used innovative clinical trial designs in her research. I am a physical therapist and clinician scientist, who always thought very clinically about problems. My goal is to promote the very clinical nature of AC&R that is already there, and really address many of the obstacles that we currently have that are limiting the care we provide to kids and to adults with rheumatic conditions. I think our combined experience and wide spectrum of scientific methods and approaches bring a nice breadth to the table.
TR: What do you see as some of the current challenges for research, for the journal and for the discipline, and how might the journal address them?
Dr. Allen: For researchers, one major challenge is the increasing time spent finding funding, which can potentially affect productivity, including being able to write manuscripts. Nonetheless, AC&R has continued to receive a high volume of manuscripts, which is encouraging, and we’ll watch that to see if that changes over time.
In the meantime, our goal at AC&R is to help the many dedicated rheumatology researchers out there to publish and disseminate their work. Although we can’t directly impact the funding landscape, we can take steps to make paper submissions easier. We want the process of submitting it, getting reviews and responding to reviews to be as smooth as possible. We know there are always things we can improve, and we’re working on ways to make that a more efficient process.
Dr. White: One of the initiatives we recently implemented at AC&R is an online system in which researchers can basically upload their entire manuscript, and the system automatically arranges it into the AC&R format: It finds the title, the abstract and all the references, and puts it all into place. That may not sound very exciting, but to the researcher, it may make the difference between deciding to submit a manuscript to AC&R or not. We want the most innovative, high-quality work in the journal, and easing that process is a way to encourage it.
On another front, I think it’s very important that the journal is supportive of the investigators who are submitting their science to us. This especially applies to young investigators because they are going to hold the torch moving forward.
TR: How does the journal encourage the next generation?
