A Look Back at JGME in 2024
The past year was momentous in many ways. A brief look back at the Journal of Graduate Medical Education’s (JGME) activities in 2024 may inform our path forward. In 2020 and 2022 we published a summary of JGME’s top accessed articles and those with the highest Altmetric scores, for the year prior.1,2 We hoped that this information could draw attention to articles that may have broad appeal but perhaps were missed at the time of publication. These articles are not necessarily the most important articles of the year, in terms of methods or findings; Original Research and other research articles tend to have more select audiences. However, these popular articles usually address broad concerns across the graduate medical education (GME) community. With this Editorial we are resuming a brief yearly summary.
Here we also provide more information about journal metrics. Given how different JGME is from many medical education journals, with its narrow focus, 6 issues per year, small production team, and other factors, context is essential for interpreting JGME metrics. Our lean production model and non-profit publisher status allow us to avoid author and reader fees, with open access for all JGME content. Other helpful context for interpreting these metrics includes article category, time of year, and internal vs external reviewed status. For example, internal rejections and Letters to the Editor have short turnaround times while Reviews often have the longest. Also, turnaround time is faster in months where reviewers and the editorial team are not typically on vacation. JGME does not have a journal impact factor, although we have been under evaluation for several years. We actively follow other article dissemination and citation information, such as Scopus (eg, Source Normalized Impact per Paper, or SNIP and CiteScore), Google Analytics, and Altmetric3 (Table).
Overall, 2024 was a very busy year for JGME, as we worked to produce not 1 but 2 supplements: Climate Change and Graduate Medical Education (December 2024) and Reimaging Residency: An American Medical Association Initiative to Transform GME (May 2025). For all participants, supplements take more effort and time than a regular issue, but allow JGME to focus on critical, timely GME issues. Throughout 2024 JGME conducted a strategic planning process, a comprehensive, lengthy process to guide future actions. We continued our calls for articles on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice and added a call for international GME articles, to further expand new voices and information about GME. We increased the production goal for visual abstracts to include all research articles. We continued the JGME podcast, Hot Topics in MedEd, and group reviewer options for junior scholars, as well as workshops at the International Conference on Residency Education and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Annual Educational Conference. Several JGME editors retired and many new editors, in both associate and resident/fellow categories, were recruited, including our first international resident editor.
Like other journals, work in 2024 occurred within chaotic national (US politics, environmental disasters) and international (war, famine, environmental disasters, more war) contexts, which informed article selections and editorials.22
Thank you for reading and following JGME. Please share your thoughts with us regarding JGME’s past year and the year forward via email (jgme@acgme.org) or social media (@jgmejournal.bsky.social).
Author Notes
